Bruce Willis shot to movie stardom in 1988 playing unlikely hero John McClane in the blockbuster action series Die Hard. Despite Die Hard's massive (and well-deserved) mainstream success, the movie was unconventional insofar as Willis' iconoclastic performance injected an unusual element of sentimentality into the typically macho thriller genre formula. Ever since, Willis has been attracted to quirky projects, resulting in some interesting performances, a long list of flops, and a few bona fide box-office smashes. One might think that Willis teaming up with Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner may signal a return to action success for the star, but Donner's own recent filmography is not so edifying, and their 2006 joint-effort 16 Blocks is both more weird and stupid than it is exciting. Willis stars in this oddball, touchy-feely chase thriller as burned-out, sad-sack New York City police detective Jack Mosely. An alcoholic with a chronic limp, Mosely is given one quick errand to run before clocking out of an all-night shift that has left him in a near-catatonic state: transport a witness from a holding cell 16 blocks to the courthouse where a grand jury awaits his testimony. As the witness, small-time crook Eddie (Mos Def), jabbers, Mosely sleepwalks him toward the courthouse, but when they stop at the liquor store to replenish Mosely's stash, his car is ambushed by assassins hired by corrupt cops to make sure Eddie never testifies against them. Mosely and Eddie spend the next hour-and-a-half racing through lower Manhattan playing cat-and-mice with Mosely's former partner Frank (David Morse) and his trigger-happy henchmen, and discovering that through this ordeal they can redeem their shady pasts. If the touches of emotional vulnerability running through Die Hard were a surprise, the spigot of sap pouring over every frame of 16 Blocks is a toxic shock; it's almost as if screenwriter Richard Wenk was trying to bring together the disparate audiences of Rush Hour and The Notebook. Willis' downtrodden Mosely is nearly a parody (a parody Willis already played perfectly in 1991's harsh treat The Last Boy Scout), but rather than emerging as an inspirational oddity, the movie wallows in discredited clichés and insipid greeting card emotions. Dragging it down even further is the unfortunately grating display by Def, as the semi-retarded Eddie. There's not much Def could do to repair this hackneyed and ridiculous character without his director reining him in, but the only way Eddie could have been more annoying is if he were played by Chris Tucker. While 16 Blocks is not a terrible movie to watch — it moves quickly and sports several points of unintentional interest (like how every block in the city is so densely crowded one can only imagine the entire population of Manhattan is walking the streets at once) — there's certainly little positive to remember about it, and its gooey finale is a classic of misguided moviemaking. Warner presents the title on DVD in a good anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The disc also includes a "shocking" alternate ending that is surprisingly no less excruciating than the awful theatrical ending, plus deleted scenes with director/screenwriter commentary. Keep-case.

Sean Penn's prodigious political posturing may not always endear him to audiences who find themselves in ideological camps opposite the fine actor, but with the starring role in this execrable remake of the 1949 Oscar-winning All the King's Men, Penn may have finally found the key to bi-partisan alienation. Penn stars as Willie Stark, a small-time Louisiana activist who learns to manipulate local politics, rising from a powerless hick to a populist governor controlling a viciously powerful, and intrinsically corrupt, machine. At Stark's side is Jack Burden (Jude Law), a former journalist-turned-hatchet man with intimate connections to the state's moneyed elite at odds with his belligerent boss. While Robert Rossen's original adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is too simplistic to fully resonate with today's politically savvy news consumer, it is at least a competent narrative with an effective, if now underwhelming, polemic. However, this new take from writer/director Steve Zaillian is a self-indulgent, aimless, backward, and muddled mess of embarrassing proportions, and not the least of which for how it wastes talents like Law, Kate Winslet (at her most drab), and Mark Ruffalo on zombie-like ciphers, while letting Penn veer off so wildly into spittle-flecked overacting that one must reach back to his 1989 bomb We're No Angels to find another of his performances so lousy as to be worthy of comparison. Zaillian, in his zeal to recast the tale of Willie Stark as some kind of noirish civic nightmare, reshuffles the narrative into a series of shadowy disjointed flashbacks that bury key relationships until after their revelations have passed the point of impact (one can only guess this all at the service of Zaillian's new additional plot twist, which is so hysterically ham-handed and thematically irrelevant that derailing the entire enterprise on its behalf makes a perfect sort of sense in this disaster). But even worse, Zaillian's entire approach is so dark and battered with brass-knuckled foreboding (Louisiana is so corrupt, even the homes of the super-rich are dingy and decaying, see?) that it rips out the very spine of the tale: that of innocent idealists corrupted by the nature of politics. Unlike in Rossen's version — where Stark starts out as a likable, boyish, but inept crusader who appeals to the nobler instincts of an aspiring reporter, before the relentless game of campaigning, compromise, and manipulating the machine turn both into cynical players too eager to sell their souls for another victory — Penn's Stark is surly and spewing invective from the start, an inevitable authoritarian whose only arc is his balance of power, and Burden is so gloomy, and preternaturally aware of the spoiled future even in the ponderous flashbacks, that Zaillian's story is charged with a tension-killing inevitability. Surely along with a film like this, with Penn in a central role, there would also be some expectation of commentary on current events, but the 2006 version of All the King's Men feels just as dated as Rossen's 57-year-old Oscar-winner, with no new ideas and the same simplistic cynicism, but this time wrapped up in an overbearing shroud of dramatic overkill with no coherent grasp of storytelling to justify it. In fact, the only memorable scenes are also the most ridiculous. Also with Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Patricia Richardson, Kathy Baker and the return of MIA 1970s child star Jackie Earle Haley as Sugar Boy.

The American Pie series' first straight-to-video effort, 2005's Band Camp, surprisingly rejuvenated the teen sex franchise, rescuing the legacy of the original 1999 hit comedy from the miserable impotency of its two limp theatrical sequels. Band Camp's smartest move was ditching the original trilogy's aging and increasingly charmless main characters in favor of focusing on the exploits of the bawdy Stifler clan, with the excellent Tad Hilgenbrink leading the juvenile hijinks. Like Band Camp, The Naked Mile tracks yet another Stifler, cousin Erik, and while star John White doesn't possess the commanding charisma that so elevated the previous film, this new entry is at least pleasing, and more than makes good on the promise of its sexploitative title. Erik is the white sheep of the family, but not by his own design. Bucking the male Stifler tradition of boinking his way through high school, senior Erik is embarrassingly still a virgin — because his long-term girlfriend Tracy (Jessy Schram) isn't ready to consummate. When she finally relents, the couple's aborted attempt to get it on is so humiliating that Tracy offers her boyfriend the chance to relieve his frustration with a "guilt-free pass" to do whatever he wants with whomever while on a weekend visit to a local university with his oversexed friends Cooze (Jake Siegel) and Trent (Jon Cor). It just so happens that this same weekend, the hard partying student body is indulging in its own bacchanalian tradition: a full frontal marathon known as "The Naked Mile." It won't take the brain power of a spider monkey for most viewers to anticipate most of the formulaic plot, but those stern enough to wade through the initial cascade of seminal, fecal, urinary, and vomitorious gross-out gags may find themselves not only laughing more than they expected, but also rediscovering some of the rowdy coming-of-age charms that made the first American Pie movie such a breakout success. Director Joe Nussbaum (of the hit internet short George Lucas in Love) and first-time screenwriter Erik Lindsay may not achieve any new breakthroughs in sophisticated sex comedy, but they sure know how to get the most out of angry dwarves, which should be enough to satisfy most anyone inclined to watch this in the first place. Also with Christopher Macdonald, Steve Talley, Candace Kroslak, Angel Lewis, and a brief appearance by Eugene Levy. Universal's American Pie presents the Naked Mile is presented in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The feature is accompanied by a commentary from Nussbaum and others, plus the featurettes "Little People, Big Stunts," "Life on The Naked Mile," "Yoga Guide for Getting Girls," and the male ass-waxing doc "The Bare Essentials," plus outtakes and deleted and extended scenes. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Tue, 3 Jan 2006 19:56:48 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (3 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/a/americanpiebandcamp.q.shtml
SUMMARY: No one seeks out the likes of American Pie: Band Camp for its narrative novelty, highbrow wit, or aesthetic mastery, and it never dares impose itself outside of its very limited formula of extreme sexual mischief and broad gags, and Band Camp is very sure of its narrow mission and a fair bit of fun.

While it was conceivable that future installments in the American Pie series of crass comedies might escape the humorlessly wretched depths of the ghastly third film, American Wedding, there was still little expectation that its immediate successor, American Pie: Band Camp (2005) — a straight-to-video release, no less, with nary a returning star — could muster enough quality to recommend it. Yet, Band Camp comes closer than the two preceding, variably poor, AP sequels in capturing the same spirit of good-hearted raunch that earned the flagship film affectionate comparisons to the free-wheeling teen sex farces of the 1980s. Wisely returning to the high school milieu the previous sequels left behind, Band Camp stars the unfortunately named Tad Hilgenbrink as Matt Stifler, the younger brother of Seann William Scott's memorably irredeemable franchise character Steve Stifler. Aspiring to match his older brother's famous reputation for depravity, Matt engages in a disciplined diet of aggressive horndogging and juvenile pranksmanship, but when one practical joke on the school band backfires and Stifler is caught with — literally — his pants down, as punishment he is forced (by Chris Owen, reprising his series role as "The Sherminator," now a guidance counselor) to spend his summer vacation at band camp. Having heard tales of wild band geek sexcapades, however, Stifler aims to exploit his incarceration with an arsenal of hidden video cameras. Of course, his hijinks are complicated when he begins to side with his fellow bandies as they compete against a haughty rival school and he falls for a sweet majorette (Arielle Kebbel). No one seeks out the likes of American Pie: Band Camp for its narrative novelty, highbrow wit, or aesthetic mastery, and it never dares impose itself outside of its very limited formula of extreme sexual mischief and broad gags, and Band Camp is very sure of its narrow mission and a fair bit of fun. Veteran director Steve Rash keeps tight control, never letting a typically gross set-piece run a second too long and overspend its minimal humor value. He also gets a few bright and charming performances out of his young cast. Hilgenbrink's mimicry of Scott's Stifler-frere is uncanny, but he also adds a likable touch of ignorant desperation that balances the character for a believable transition from antagonizing asshole to heartstruck hero. Kebbel, as the perky but serious Elyse, is a delightfully vulnerable match for Stifler's crude antics, and her tenderly drawn character echoes the unexaggerated archetypes that helped distinguish the original American Pie from the less-memorable teen comedies. Band Camp, however, never aspires to capture the kind of coming-of-age journey that further transformed the first movie (and, misapplied, helped derail the other sequels), and in ably embracing the less ambitious purpose of dumb sex jokes, Band Camp is perhaps more true to the legacy of Porky's and its ilk than its oft-compared predecessor. Also with Eugene Levy, returning in a bit part as "Jim's Dad," and aging porn legend Ginger Lynn. American Pie: Band Camp is presented in an unrated version with eight minutes of extra material. The film is presented in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The "unrated" extras include "Poolside With the Band Camp Girls," "Unrated Love Lessons With Ginger Lynn," outtakes and deleted scenes, "Band Camp Girls" Music Video, " Rover Cam Uncut," and "Band Camp's Dirty Secrets." Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/a/americanwerewolflondon.q.shtml
EDITION: Collector's Edition

An Unfinished Life (2005) is just the kind of star-studded melodrama that make studios greedily anticipate the gratification of awards season. Acclaimed stars like Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman mingling with cross-cultural phenomenon Jennifer Lopez and the rising talent of Josh Lucas. A generational story of love, loss, and reunion, set against the scenic backdrop of Wyoming. And all under the delicate hand of Swedish director Lasse Hallström, whose movies have been Oscar-magnets since his fine 1988 breakthrough foreign language effort My Life as a Dog earned him a Best Director nod and led him to a Hollywood career of prestigious art house titles like What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Cider House Rules, and Chocolat. Yet, An Unfinished Life flopped at the box office and received no honors — while it is well-made in most regards and bears no egregious flaws, it is surprisingly, forgettably ordinary. Lopez stars as Jean, a battered girlfriend who packs up her 11-year-old daughter Griff (Becca Gardner) and leaves Iowa, but when their car breaks down 300 miles away from home, the homeless pair head for Wyoming, where Griff's grandfather, Einer (Robert Redford) continues to mope over the death of his son, the father Griff never knew. Although Einer is crusty and bitter, and blames Jean for the car accident that killed her husband, he takes a reluctant liking to his wise-beyond-her-years granddaughter. As Einer and Griff bond, the tension between Einer and Jean simmers and then explodes before they ultimately come to a mutual respect and affection. And, of course, Morgan Freeman is on-hand as Einer's stoic and sagacious friend of 40 years, who, even though he was badly mauled by a wild bear a year ago, yearns for the bear's release from humiliating captivity, because that's the kind of character Freeman always plays. An Unfinished Life is probably as good as it can be as one of those movies where nearly every character gets to deliver a heart-felt, soul-bearing speech uncomplicated by subtext. All of the actors — even the underrated Lopez — are very, very good, and there are some nice, gentle moments that elevate what is, in essence, a remedially manipulative Hallmark Network-quality, "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" screenplay by Mark and Virginia Korus Spragg. Hallström, thankfully, eschews the smug polemics of his more recent movies, but in doing so drifts fairly aimlessly throughout this anonymous and predictably hokey kitchen-sink drama, notable mostly for Freeman's self-parodying typecasting as a grizzled, hard-knocks, know-it-all impressively spouting, Tourettes-like, pseudo-penetrating nonsense. Also with Lucas as Jean's nice new love interest, and Camryn Manheim. Buena Vista's DVD release of An Unfinished Life offers a good anamorphic transfer (2.40:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Supplements include an earnest commentary by Hallström, producer Leslie Holleran, and editor Andrew Mondshein, as well as the featurettes "The Making of An Unfinished Life" and "Training Bart the Bear." Stills gallery, keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 25 Nov 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (3 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/a/angela.q.shtml

As would-be presidential assassins go, Sam Byck was a miserable failure. In 1974, Byck attempted to hijack an airplane with the intent to fly it into the White House. However, the poorly planned hijacking was such a mess that Byck was killed by police before the plane even left the gate, and his ambitious motivation for the soon-forgotten crime was only discovered weeks later. Aiming for infamy, Byck died in obscurity. He was not only overshadowed in the tumultuous contemporary news by Watergate and the Vietnam War, but Byck also suffered by comparison to his peers: sexier failed assassins, like Manson moll Lynne 'Squeaky' Fromme and disgruntled housewife Sara Jane Moore, both of whom attacked Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, in the space of a month. In Niels Mueller's fine The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004), Byck's defining impotence is so carefully wrought that he emerges from his anonymity as an effectively empathetic poster-boy for all despondent losers with violent urges and messianic delusions. Sean Penn stars as "Sam Bicke" (a name change so trivial one wonders if it was meant less to connote fictionalization but primarily to invite comparison to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle; as "Bicke," Penn constantly evokes a hybrid of Robert De Niro's brilliant performances as Bickle and The King of Comedy's hapless Rupert Pupkin), who, before his inept attempt at history, may have been one of the worst salesmen ever. Bicke is enslaved to an exaggerated sense of zealous personal ethics, making him unable to "lie" to make a living selling office furniture — a handicap so socially debilitating that it has ruined his marriage to Marie (Naomi Watts), destroyed his relationship with his successful brother (Michael Wincott), and runs the risk of alienating his only remaining friend, Bonny (Don Cheadle), an auto mechanic with whom Bicke hopes to start his own business. Mueller's movie (co-written by the director with Kevin Kennedy), which primarily concerns the final year of Bicke's life, doesn't investigate how Bicke originally began his descent into madness. He was, after all, at one time apparently sane enough for Marie to bear three of his children, and for the decent Bonny to humor his eccentricities. By the time The Assassination of Richard Nixon begins, Bicke has already begun his downward keel, and although the movie runs a brisk 95 minutes, that gives ample time for Mueller and Penn to explore his acceleration toward self-destruction. However, unlike most dramas about relentlessly depressing downward spirals, Bicke makes a strongly sympathetic anti-hero. His desperation to succeed on his own lofty, but impractical, terms is the key to his failure, and his yearning to repair ties with his wife is heartbreaking; unable to introspect, Bicke's self-imposed failure transmogrifies into a mammoth persecution complex. Bicke feels his life is held hostage by a conspiracy of powerful liars, beginning with the successful salesmen (and boss, Jack Thompson) who belittle him at work, and leading to the world's shiftiest, most powerful salesman: Richard Nixon. Although his intent to assassinate the president of the United States is fueled by personal angst rather than politics, Bicke's jones for victimization makes him an eager sponge for leftist conspiracy theories (the movie's funniest scene involves Bicke pitching a significant change of focus to the Black Panthers), which further fuel his detachment, paranoia, and helplessness. Penn is terrific as Bicke, always keeping him likable despite his instability, and making his faltering final act (during which he murdered two people) more sad than it is revolting. It's Penn's best performance since 1995's Dead Man Walking, and a marvelously confident and controlled directorial debut by Mueller. Byck may have become a mere footnote to history (except for discussion of this movie and his similar fictionalization in Stephen Sondheim's great musical Assassins, Byck's real story has very little Internet presence), but he may have inspired the most accurate and telling depiction yet of the making of an assassin. New Line presents The Assassination of Richard Nixon in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Keep-case.

Walt Disney's 1942 adaptation of Felix Salten's woodland fantasy novel is one of the entertainment mogul's most enduring works of art, combining the fanciful storytelling of earlier Disney features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with the episodic structure of the vignettes in 1940's Fantasia. More then other most other Disney cartoons of its day, Bambi found a way of lingering in the subconscious, owing to its unconventional, poetic style and its frank dealing with death and danger. Less a narrative than a series of animated ballets on a running theme, Bambi follows the life of the eponymous deer prince, from his birth into the lively forest, his friendships with an obstinate rabbit named Thumper and a precious skunk named Flower, his romance with doe Faline, and the threat posed to wildlife by predatory and careless Man. The hand-painted animation is lush, layered, and exquisite in a way that few of today's digitally animated movies seem capable of approaching, and fans of the form are certain to devour every frame of Bambi's visual mastery with due awe. Most of the movie's other qualities, however, while perfect for children under six, may leave adults with fond memories of the movie feigning satisfaction for old time's sake. Bambi's original music (by Edward Plumb, Robert Sour, Helen Bliss, Frank Churchill, Henry Manners and Larry Morey) works nicely as a score, but the songs are syrupy and forgettable. The first half of this 70-minute feature, with its childlike awe and sparse dialogue, while graceful and pleasant, is as likely to tranquilize adults as it is to amuse their children. Even so, Bambi does manage to build from its slow start to a more engaging second act and an emotionally satisfying climax for those with the patience to stick with it. Parents who don't mind the story's lurking, idealized, animal-worshipping didacticism should find it a wonderful antidote to the busy and often flat contemporary kid's programming, but one they won't necessarily want to watch themselves, except to momentarily take in the beautiful scenery.

*          *          *

There may be no more accurate fictional portrayal of adolescent malehood than MTV's mid-1990s animated series Beavis and Butt-head. As such, this collection's 40 Season One episodes "that didn't suck," as picked by creator Mike Judge, are occasionally amusing but overwhelmingly erratic and juvenile, and best taken in small doses. Nevertheless, the cultural relevance of Judge's breakthrough creation far exceeds the modest ambition evident in its sloppy production or the mild stimulation provided by its slight social parody and lower-than-low humor. The show — a loose series of five-to-seven-minute episodes about the misadventures of two crude, sociopathic, sub-intelligent teenagers with aggressive ADD, debilitating hormones, filthy mouths, and an obsession with things scatological — was an instant pop-culture phenomenon, making immediate fans of the network's Generation X&Y demographic while drawing a media frenzy of outrage from self-appointed moral guardians. But arguably more important to the series' success than its more conventional narrative sequences were the irony-ready tidbits of meta-programming that filled in the rest of the show's half-hour time-slot: unrelated scenes of Beavis and Butt-head watching MTV and offering irreverent and profane couch potato commentaries during clips of current music videos — which was a bracing, directly self-deprecating reflection of the very audience watching Beavis and Butt-head. It made for brilliant post-modern pop-culture. Finally, in Paramount's Beavis and Butt-Head: Vol. 1: The Mike Judge Collection, some of these segments make it to home video, but only 11, each running about one-and-a-half minutes and relegated to the bonus features disc. The other two parts of this three-disc set are loaded with the less impressive "episodes," as Beavis and Butt-head engage in conscience-free mayhem and mischief. For the most part, these narratives are unremarkable, save for Beavis' occasional spastic outbursts, which culminate in the classic episode "The Great Cornholio." But these moments are few, and while the rest makes for genial stupidity in its originally intended five-minute blocks, the show doesn't really hold-up to the type of marathon viewing facilitated by DVD sets such as this. However, even during the its most uninspired moments, one can't help but marvel at Judge's prescience. Not only did Beavis and Butt-head pave the way for the more sophisticated gross humor of "South Park," but it predicted by a full decade the substantively identical reality TV stars Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. Paramount's Beavis and Butt-Head: Vol. 1: The Mike Judge Collection features 40 Season One episodes, including 23 in uncut and uncensored "Director's Cuts." A third disc features 11 excerpted music videos with Beavis and Butt-head commentary, the featurette "Taint of Greatness: The Journey of Beavis and Butt-head, Part 1," MTV Thanksgiving Special appearances, Video Music Awards appearances, show promos, and the short montages "Terms of Endearment" and "Greatest Hits." Three slimline keep-cases in a paperboard sleeve.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/b/beforesunrise.q.shtml

It's tempting to classify this 2004 sequel to Richard Linklater's unusual, indelible 1995 Gen-X love story Before Sunrise as a well-made TV reunion special. Even though Before Sunrise was only a modest, low-budget, 105-minute sleeper, to its stalwart fans it indelibly captured the spark of romantic chemistry. In a good way, it seemed to last hours, as if chronicling the brief relationship of Jessie (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in real-time, from their tentative meeting as strangers on a Vienna train until their tearful pledge to reunite, six months later at the very same spot, the next morning. Their time together was less than day, but it was intimately and thoroughly explored and seemed to encapsulate a lifetime of hope, dreams, yearning, trust, and potential, and the question provoked by Before Sunrise's open ending — Will Jessie and Celine meet again? — expertly and movingly embodied the film's bittersweet sense of spontaneity, wonder, and possibility. Given the pleading timelessness of Before Sunrise's finale, the follow-up Before Sunset feels, at times, like an obligatory-but-anticlimactic catching-up with intimately familiar long-lost friends, reuniting director Linklater with stars Hawke and Delpy (the three share writing credit) for a mostly unnecessary reprise that, while done as well as imaginable, both dishearteningly answers that lingering question and poses a few new unanswered questions of its own. Before Sunset, actually, is nearly filmed in real time, as Celine and Jessie spend just over an hour together walking through Paris, nine years older and now looking at their lives from the more cynical perspective of their early 30s. To their credit, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy knowingly mirror Before Sunset's flaws in its narrative: the dispiriting sense of knowing what the first film left a mystery is echoed in Jessie and Celine's wizened interactions, and the prosaic deflation of Before Sunrise's ideal one-night-fling similarly haunts and obsesses the characters's older selves. Hawke and Delpy are still very good together, and very believable as characters who have become increasingly autobiographical, but the quirks that originally made the couple endearing necessarily have worn through, making them less appealing as adults. Like running into any old, once-close friend idealized from one's youth, Before Sunset is comforting and yet awkward and disappointing as reality sets in, and maybe tells us things we don't want to know. In that way, Before Sunset is just as good as its predecessor — but, hardened by the years in between, it will never capture the magic that made the first film a classic, and might possibly even lessen Before Sunrise's original power. Warner presents the film in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. This disc includes a brief "On the Set" featurette. Trailer, keep-case.

After the blockbuster box office success of 1967's Valley of the Dolls, Fox was anxious to produce a follow-up. However, unable to reach agreement on a true sequel with Valley author Jacqueline Susann, the studio opted instead to put together a thematic sequel, exercising their rights to the Valley of the Dolls name but not Susann's original characters. Already lagging behind the rival studios in appealing to the new counter-cultural explosion of the late '60s, Fox took the ballsy move of handing the reins of its marquee franchise to "King of the Nudies" Russ Meyer, who had established himself as one of the most original and successful auteurs of the exploitation genre with thrifty underground classics like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) and Vixen (1968). Meyer, along with film critic Roger Ebert as screenwriter, reached deep into Valley of the Dolls' soapy cautionary tale about the lurid perils of fame and ripped out its bloody heart with a satirical cry of abandon, creating an uneven but frequently invigorating pastiche of swinging '60s hippy spoofs and gleefully massacred movie clichés. Dolly Read stars as Kelly, the gutsy but naive singer of a small-town, all-girl rock band that hits the road for L.A. and gets tangled up in the twisted party scene of insane record mogul Ronnie "Z-man" Barzell (John LaZar). Although mild by Meyer's racy indie standards, this "musical horror-sex-comedy" piles on top of its namesake's comparatively sterile sensationalism healthy dollops of vigorous sex, comic violence, sincere camp, and all-American sleaze — making it a real shock coming from the studio system.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls sees Susann's pill-popping, bed-hopping, suicidal backstabbers and raises the stakes with peyote, paraplegia, gigoloism, lesbianism, Nazism, and decapitation. But Meyer isn't interested (primarily) in shock value. His movies are usually also visually exciting and exceptionally literate, and BVD brims with classic dialogue, the best of which spouts forth from Z-Man, who swerves from stoned ("This is my happening and it freaks me out!") to pseudo-Shakespearean ("I swear to you, you will drink the black sperm of my vengeance"). The manic narrative hits some slow pockets during the first half — mostly as Kelly faces off against the slimy lawyer (Duncan McLeod) of her rich aunt Susan (Phyllis Davis) — and some of Meyer's hyperactive editing is more jarring than groovy. That said, most of BVD's hysterical melodrama plays like pitch-perfect parody, and the cast is both distinctive and effective. Read, a Playboy Playmate of the Year, sparkles with charisma and simmers with misguided self-righteous conviction as Kelly. As her bandmates, fellow Playmate Cynthia Myers is broodingly vulnerable and Marcia McBroom is saucy, fun, and spontaneous. Although LaZar deservedly steals many scenes as the flamboyant Z-Man, his male co-stars are also uniformly excellent, most notably Michael Blodgett as the squalid, gold-digging hunk Lance Rock (picture a seedier, blonde Rob Lowe), but McLeod, David Gurian as Kelly's hapless boyfriend Harris, Harrison Page as the cuckolded law student Emerson Thorne, and James Inglehart as an Ali-like philosophical prizefighter are all given rich opportunities to shine. Also with Charles Napier, Erica Gavin, and the inimitably slutty Edy Williams purring come-ons like "You're a groovy boy; I'd like to strap you on sometime!" Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is not for every taste, but film fans who love witty camp and outrageous depravity should find that it hits all the right notes, and it boasts the most wildly entertaining final half-hour in the history of the exploitation genre.

*          *          *

Fox's two-disc Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is presented in an excellent "Cinema Classics Collection" special edition with a terrific anamorphic transfer (2.35:1), while the audio is available in both Dolby 2.0 Surround and Dolby 1.0 mixes. Screenwriter Roger Ebert provides an in-depth and entertaining commentary track in which he speaks very affectionately about Meyer's work process (and also details an abandoned film project the two had started with The Sex Pistols). A second commentary track features cast members Read, Myers, Page, LaZar, and Gavin, but aside from their pointing out Meyer's aversion to his actors blinking (which will likely preoccupy viewers on repeat screenings) this group is far from edifying and frequently spoiled by LaZar's bad attitude. Those who like to listen to women over 50 talk about their breasts might find it has more to offer.

Nearly every horror movie relies in some part on the concept of a "boogeyman" — a ruthless, single-minded, indestructible personification of evil, lurking in the shadows and attacking the vulnerable. This venerable spectre of childhood fear has been made so familiar through its routine depiction in filmed entertainment that it's a feat worthy of remark that Stephen Kay's cleverly titled Boogeyman takes such a simple and ingrained trope and manages to make it muddled, aimless, and confusing. "7th Heaven" heartthrob Barry Watson stars as Tim, a young man still haunted by the disappearance of his father 20 years earlier. While the official story is that Tim's dad was a deadbeat, a frightened young Tim saw his father pulled screaming into the darkness of his bedroom closet, never to be seen again. Now an adult, Tim — in what a more interesting film would play as a metaphor for self-loathing video-game quality visual effects rage — is terrified of closets. He also suffers from horrifying dreams that hearken back to his boyhood trauma, causing a spot of difficulty with his saucy girlfriend, Jessica, who, despite the warning signs, hasn't figured out that her boyfriend is mentally troubled. When his mother (Lucy Lawless) passes away, Tim returns to his deserted childhood home and faces down the shadows that continue to torment him. While most horror films are workmanlike slaves to a tired genre, Boogeyman's screenplay (by no less than three writers: Eric Kripke, Juliet Snowden, and Stiles White) jumps pointlessly from weak horror formula to weak horror formula like an overstimulated pre-teen comic book fanboy with ADD. Following the half-decent opening scene of Tim's father's closet-mauling, the actual Boogeyman is MIA for most of the next hour, until — after many long scenes of Tim freaking out and spastically wrestling with 20-year-old coats in a cloakroom — it begins to stalk him, targeting not only Jessica, but Tim's childhood friend Kate (Emily Deschanel), her father, and Tim's uncle Mike (Philip Gordon). The mystery of why the Boogeyman has a jones for terrorizing adult Tim remains unclear, as do several of the movie's other key plot points, such as Tim's inadvertent teleporting between locations and his final effortless victory over the Boogeyman, of which the only explanation is that the movie's allotted 89 minutes were nearly up and it had to end somehow. Not many scares or other visceral delights are found in Boogeyman, but sufferers of itchy-scalp conditions may benefit from some post-movie head-scratching. Columbia TriStar presents Boogeyman in a good anamorphic transfer (1:85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. This disc also includes two "making-of" featurettes, an alternate ending (that's just as silly and incomprehensible as the theatrical ending), animated storyboards, progressions of the video-game quality visual effects, and six deleted scenes. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/b/bookofshadows.q.shtml

The most talked about movie of 2005 shocked audiences by brazenly snaring an Oscar nomination for a former cast member of "Dawson's Creek." Also controversial was the movie's subject matter: a decades-long gay affair between two cowboys. Hollywood celebrated the film for its unusually frank portrayal of homosexual passion, and sympathetic audiences turned this small $14 million drama into a sleeper of blockbuster proportions. The unconventional concept behind Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain also struck the American funny-bone, provoking a million late-night jokes, watercooler jibes, and Internet parodies, while some cultural critics bemoaned the movie's fawning advocates as smug liberal elitism personified. Brokeback Mountain so saturated the media that Brokeback-fatigue was credited for its upset Best Picture loss to Crash at the Academy Awards. In the middle of all of the hype and posturing, an interesting, intimate, and complex movie has been publicly deconstructed, misconceived, and reassembled into a vague and rumored version of itself. Now on DVD, the real Brokeback Mountain gets a chance to clear the record and stand apart from all its attendant chatter.

Heath Ledger stars as Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, a couple of hard-luck young cowhands who are hired together to mind sheep on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain during the summer of 1963. Their work is rough and isolating, months spent camping alone in harsh weather, in each other's company only for meals, and outside contact limited to once-weekly supply deliveries. Jack, the careless son of a bull-rider, enjoys the freedom he finds so close to nature, but he isn't as fond of the work or loneliness; taciturn Ennis is more adept and obedient to the tough discipline of his vocation. However, with some prompting from Jack, Ennis not only opens up a little, but following a night of drinking joins Jack in the pup tent for some rough sex. This new facet to their relationship distracts the confused Ennis from his responsibilities, and after their boss (Randy Quaid) discovers the mess made of his flock, he fires them both. Ennis stays in Wyoming and marries Alma (Michelle Williams), who bears him two daughters. Jack joins a rodeo circuit and marries a precocious cowgirl, Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Soon after they have a son, and Jack goes to work selling farm machinery in Texas for her successful father. But after four years of traditional domesticity, restless Jack calls on Ennis, who — despite his sense of duty to his girls — eagerly rekindles their affair, beginning two decades of semi-annual "fishing" trips to the mountains where they first consummated their secret bond. Ennis makes for an awkward rule-breaker, and, in a flash of indiscretion, Alma witnesses the uncommon affection between the old friends, which leads to the slow disintegration of their marriage. Jack remains married to Lureen, but he struggles to counter the masculine Texan swagger of her domineering dad. As their two separate lives grow increasingly dull, dead, and forlorn, Ennis' and Jack's periodic liaisons at Brokeback Mountain become all either of them look forward to in life.

On its very surface, it's easy to read Brokeback Mountain, as many have — a simple statement in support of gay rights. Had Ennis and Jack not felt compelled by societal mores to marry heterosexually and raise families, they might not have endured such emotionally bleak lives. Alternatively, one might imagine, if Jack and Ennis had lived together (as Jack suggests) and "ranched up," they may well have had a fulfilling long-term relationship with none of the drudgery of work-for-hire or stress of unemployment during times of scarcity. But a more careful look at Brokeback Mountain draws those easy conclusions into muddy irresolution, if not doubt. As it deals, in part, with the corrosive nature of secrets, nearly every scene in Brokeback is about some form of deceit — most of the movie plays out in subtext as the characters repeatedly lie to each other, and themselves. In an era of postmodern film critique, where critics and film-school professors illuminate alleged gay subtext in macho Old Hollywood cowboy movies, Brokeback turns the tables. Early on, when Jack tells Ennis that, although they're both supposed to eat beans for dinner every night, he'd much rather break the rules and kill one of the sheep they're paid to protect, it's no longer clever to read this as a straightforward metaphor for Jack's socially taboo homosexual urges. The subtext of old has become the new text, and something different is going on between the lines. The fact is that Jack and Ennis make a tough couple to pin up as icons for social policy arguments. While scenes of their relationships with their spouses are full of emotionally charged successes and, moreso, failures, the Ennis-Jack partnership remains pretty much a blank slate throughout. Their early encounters are violent, and as they re-engage on their lifelong tryst, their trips to Brokeback become more about escapism from their empty adult lives than mileposts of an enduring love story. One on one, Jack and Ennis are dysfunctional and destructive, with Jack's chronic manipulations inevitably resulting in Ennis' disastrous slips into irresponsibility. Would or could they have really shared an idyllic life together if only they had been allowed? Or was the physical, uncompromising, natural locale of Brokeback Mountain really just an idealized fantasy refuge recalling the freedom of youth for two struggling older men to tune out the complicating interferences of their daily grown-up lives — and, in the process, further disenchant and detach themselves from any possibility of everyday happiness in the real world? These are the questions that Brokeback Mountain puts to its viewers, and they are less about the emergence of a gay-tolerant America and more about the very business of fiction and filmmaking, where characters' motivations remain obscure and open to continuous interpretation. If the film remains a topic of discussion over several years, if not decades, one hopes it will be because it says more about two interesting, complex men than it does about any one group they are alleged to represent.

Note: This review of the DVD release for Brokeback Mountain was originally submitted to the DVD Journal, and an edited version was published here. While I didn't have any arguments with the edits (they were mostly my fault for submitting a review that was too long for for the format), I figured I might as well as post my full review, which includes a few additional points worth pondering, plus praise for the movie's technical aspects. So, in the tradition of indulgent DVD releases, here is my "Reviewer's Cut" of my review of Brokeback Mountain:

The most talked about movie of 2005 shocked audiences by brazenly snaring an Oscar nomination for a former cast member of Dawson's Creek. Also controversial was the movie's subject matter: a decades-long gay affair between two cowboys. Hollywood celebrated the film for its unusually frank portrayal of 'the love that dare not say 'hee-haw' and sympathetic audiences turned this small $14 million drama into a sleeper of blockbuster proportions. Brokeback Mountain's unconventional concept also struck the collective funny bone, provoking a million late-night jokes, watercooler jibes and internet parodies, while some cultural critics bemoaned the movie's fawning advocates as smug liberal elitism personified. Brokeback Mountain so saturated the media, that Brokeback-fatigue was credited for its upset Best Picture loss to Crash at the 2006 Academy Awards. In the middle of all of the hype and posturing, an interesting, intimate and complex movie has been publicly deconstructed, misconceived and reassembled into a Frankenstein monster-version of itself. Now on DVD, the real Brokeback Mountain gets a chance to clear the record and stand apart from all its attendant hoopla.

Heath Ledger stars as Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, a couple of hard-luck young cowhands who are hired together to mind sheep on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain during the summer of 1963. Their work is rough and isolating, months spent camping alone in harsh weather, in each other's company only for meals, and outside contact limited to once-weekly supply deliveries. Jack, the careless son of a bull rider, enjoys the freedom so close to nature but is not so fond of the work or loneliness; Ennis, a taciturn ranch-hand, is more adept and obedient to the tough discipline of his vocation.With a little prodding from Jack, however, Ennis not only opens up a little, but following a night of drinking joins Jack in the pup tent for some rough sex. This new facet to their relationship distracts the confused Ennis from his responsibilities, and when their boss discovers the mess made of his flock (and witnesses some suggestive horseplay between his hired hands) he fires them both. Ennis stays in Wyoming and marries Alma (Michelle Williams), who bears him two daughters. Jack joins the rodeo and marries a precocious cowgirl, Lureen (Anne Hathaway). They have a son and Jack goes to work selling high-end industrial farm machinery in Texas for her successful father. After four years of traditional domesticity, however, restless Jack calls on Ennis, who, despite his sense of duty to his girls, eagerly rekindles their affair, beginning two decades of semi-annual "fishing" trips to the mountains where they first consummated their secret bond. Ennis makes for an awkward rule-breaker, and, in a flash of indiscretion, Alma witnesses the uncommon affection between the old friends, and Ennis' marriage slowly falls apart as she withdraws from the husband whose secret life makes a mockery of their family. Jack stays married to Lureen, but struggles to counter the masculine Texan swagger of her domineering dad. As their two separate lives grow increasingly dull, dead, and forlorn, Ennis' and Jack's periodic liaisons at Brokeback Mountain become all either of them look forward to in life.

On its very surface, it's easy to read Brokeback Mountain, as many have, as a simple argument for gay rights. Had Ennis and Jack not felt compelled by societal mores to marry heterosexually and raise families, they may not have led such bleak emotional journeys. Alternatively, one might imagine, if Jack and Ennis had lived together, as Jack suggests, in touch with nature (wink, wink) and opened a ranch together, they may well have had a fulfilling long-term relationship with none of the drudgery of work-for-hire or stress of unemployment during times of scarcity. But a more careful look at Brokeback Mountain draws those easy conclusions into muddy irresolution, if not doubt. As it deals, in part, with the corrosive nature of secrets, nearly every scene in Brokeback is about some form of deceit and most of the movie plays out in subtext as the characters lie to each other and themselves. In this post-modern age of film interpretation, where every film school is loaded with professors anxious to read gay subtext into the macho cowboy movies of yore, Brokeback pulls a neat switcheroo. Early on, when Jack tells Ennis, over a campfire, that, although they're both supposed to eat beans for dinner every night, he'd much rather violate the rules to eat one of the sheep they're assigned to protect, it's no longer clever to read this as a straightforward metaphor for Jack's socially taboo homosexual urges. The subtext of old has become the new text, and something different is going on between the lines. Jack and Ennis make a tough couple to pin-up as icons for social policy arguments. While scenes of their relationships with their spouses are full of emotionally charged successes and, moreso, failures, the Ennis-Jack partnership remains pretty much a blank slate throughout. Their early encounters are violent, and as they re-engage on their lifelong tryst, their trips to Brokeback become more about escapism from their empty adult lives than mileposts of an enduring love story. One on one, Jack and Ennis are dysfunctional and destructive, with Jack's chronic manipulations inevitably resulting in Ennis' disastrous slips into irresponsibility. Would or could they have really shared an idyllic life together if only they had been allowed? Or was the physical, uncompromising, natural locale of Brokeback Mountain really just an idealized fantasy refuge recalling the freedom of youth for two struggling older men to tune out the complicating interferences of their daily grown-up lives — and, in the process, further disenchant and detach themselves from any possibility of everyday happiness in the real world?

Directed by Ang Lee, who wisely chose a small picture to follow-up his disastrous comic book mess Hulk, Brokeback Mountain was adapted from the E. Annie Proulx short story by western literary veteran Larry McMurtry and his frequent collaborator Diana Ossana. The screenplay is rich in detail and texture, and Lee, as usual in his quieter films, very gently extracts powerful emotions where they are least expected, and leaves many questions unanswered. For Brokeback, incongruously, this results in the movie's most effective scenes occurring between Jack and Ennis and their families, respectively, with the pull of empathy toward the wives and children dealing with husbands and fathers declining their sense of duty to their families. That Jack and Ennis together remain such a mystery, to the audience and themselves, carves a hole in the immediate resonance of the film and the mad rush to herald it as socially transformative (even Lee has bizarrely claimed that Ennis and Jack teach all of us "about the greatness of love itself," but one would be hard-pressed to find citations in the movie to support that). Brokeback Mountain is a worthy contender for the most talked about movie of 2005, but does not fit easily into single-minded categories.

Gyllenhaal is terrific casting as Twist, and gives yet another riveting performance in what is surely his breakthrough year. Ledger is excellent as the unsophisticated Ennis, bottling up emotions that even he is unable to make sense of (although his tendency to channel Billy Bob Thornton's character from Sling Blade makes about half of his grumbled dialog cry out for subtitles). The supporting cast fills out nicely around the edges, with Dawson's Creek starlet Williams impressing in what must now be called a recurring motif of gay-themed roles, and Hathaway also makes a clean break from her teen movie past. A few more TV actors acquit themselves appropriately, including Linda Cardellini (of Freaks and Geeks and E.R.) and Kate Mara (Jack and Bobby and recently 24), and Scary Movie star Anna Faris appears as well. Lee won an Oscar for Best Director, as did screenwriters Ossana and McMurtry and composer Gustavo Santaolalla.

Universal Home Entertainment presents Brokeback Mountain in a 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The disc includes four featurettes: the Logo Movie Special "Sharing the Story: The Making of Brokeback Mountain" (20:48), "Directing From the Heart: Ang Lee" (7:28), "On Being A Cowboy" (5:45) about the cast learning tricks of the cowboy trade, and " From Script to Screen: Interviews with Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana" (10:52). Keep case.

Art house icon Jim Jarmusch is often credited with pioneering independent filmmaking in the 1980s with his critically heralded, oddball, underground shoestring comedies Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down by Law (1986; collective gross: $4 million). Bill Murray, meanwhile, was starring in less obscure comic fare like Ghostbusters (1984; gross $238 million). In the mid-1990's, waning Murray began searching out a new niche in the surging indie movement, resulting in a string of terrific, droll performances including quirky classics like Rushmore (1997) and Lost in Translation (2003). At the same time, Jarmusch, while attracting a few bigger stars (like Johnny Depp in 1995's Dead Man), managed to stay obscure through persistence of his unpopular vision, as other indies were breaking through to mainstream audiences. Broken Flowers is a natural crossing of these two career paths, with Jarmusch delivering his, ostensibly, most accessible movie to date, featuring former Hollywood heavyweights like Murray, Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange, and with a modest gross of $13 million (so far) nearly equaling the total take of his seven previous feature films combined. Murray, continuing his acclaimed course of playing sad-sack, aging bachelors devoured by wry self-contempt, finds in Jarmusch a director who will dwell even longer on his effectively weary, rueful visage, and in Broken Flowers a script perfectly tailored for such. Murray stars as Don Johnston, a veteran lothario joylessly inhabiting a shell of his former self; wealthy but not working, living in a big house with few signs of life or warmth, and watching yet another woman walk out of his door in disappointment. As Sherry (Julie Delpy) leaves, however, Don receives an anonymous letter informing him that two decades earlier one of his flings resulted in a now-grown son who is seeking him out. Don's lively neighbor and friend (Geoffrey Wright), an amateur detective, prods him into taking an investigative road trip to visit his four lovers from the period in question and determine which, if any, bore his child and sent the letter. As a Jarmusch film, Broken Flowers is not so much about plot points as it is about mood and journey, and some indication of the typical pacing of Jarmusch's films is that it takes over half an hour for Don to begin his trip. As he drops in on his former flings (Sharon Stone, France Conroy, Jessica Lange, and an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, who looks like Cher), each in their own unique situations and with their own mysterious reactions to his surprise visit, Don questions not only the purpose of the venture, but that of his lonely life itself. At its best, Broken Flowers is dry and contemplative, evoking bittersweet memories, faded perceptions, awkward reunions and forgotten emotions. But while Jarmusch's uniquely patient style is largely responsible for creating the film's effective mood, it is also always his greatest obstacle. If every painstakingly long (bordering of self-parodic), quiet shot of Don sitting morosely on his couch or pensively driving a rental car were cut in half, one suspects Broken Flowers would shed nearly half an hour from its 1 hour, 46 minute, running time, leaving little more than a short subject. Nonetheless, Murray is the perfect vehicle for such a study, for the most part able to bear Jarmusch's stubborn gaze and carve out of the frozen canvas of morose meditation a pinhole of personality — and yet one has to wonder if Broken Flowers signals the end of the line for Murray's recent embodiment of sour middle-aged regret. It's hard to imagine a more thorough variation on that theme, although one with a little less dead time would be nice. Also with Chloe Sevigny, Christopher MacDonald and Alex Dzienas. Presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1. Includes a couple of outtakes reels, one of which features a phone conversation with Jarmusch about the movie. Trailer, keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/b/brokenheartsclub.q.shtml

On both stage, in 1945, and on screen, in 1956, the legendary musical partnership of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II followed up their resounding classic Oklahoma with the much beloved but also very, very odd tragedy Carousel. Based on Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom, Carousel chronicles a doomed relationship in a turn-of-the-19th-century Maine fishing town. When young and stubborn Julie Jordan (Shirley Jones) catches the eye of Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae), the handsome ne'er-do-well barker at the local carousel, she shrugs off the admonitions of her small-town peers and somehow convinces Billy to commit the single honorable act of his entire life: He marries her. But it's all downhill from there, as Billy — apparently singularly skilled at carousel barking — becomes a shiftless freeloader with a quick temper that fails to spare his beleaguered wife a smack every now and then. When Julie tells Billy she's pregnant, she expects the worst, and, but for a momentary surge of chivalry and excitement, Billy delivers, convinced that the only way he can support his progeny is by joining a hoodlum pal (Cameron Mitchell) in an act of armed robbery. As with most of Billy's plans, the heist goes awry and Billy dies from a self-inflicted wound. In the afterlife, however, Billy is granted a one-day return to Earth when his now-teenage daughter, Louise (Susan Luckey), desperately requires the guidance of the worst parent ever. Carousel is a most bizarre production in many respects, most of which are overlooked for its occasionally majestic music, which includes the classic Rodgers & Hammerstein tunes "If I Loved You," "Soliloquy," and the powerful anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone." But the story of the musical — already unusual for its dour narrative — is quite shocking by today's standards for both its frank depiction of an abusive marriage and for its heroine's even more frank rationalization (in the song "What's the Use of Wondrin'?") and even fetishization of the abuse (such as when the older and wiser Julie fondly waxes "It is possible, dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all"). While there is a lot of substance in the film's contrast between the troubled relationship of Julie and Billy and the happier coupling of Julie's friend Carrie (Barbara Ruick) with promising fisherman Enoch Snow (Robert Rounseville) — demonstrating by example that the latter's plain hopes and simple dreams ("When the Children Are Asleep") bring greater rewards, while Julie's attraction to danger and Billy's grousing discontent comes to little good — Hammerstein's adaptation and Henry King's direction accent the depiction of Carrie and Enoch with a pronounced sneer of condescending derision. It's a movie no father should ever want his daughters to see. Even with Billy's ultimate sliver of redemption (coming 15 years posthumously, which many might fairly consider too late) backed up with the stirring promise of "You'll Never Walk Alone" tugging at the heart-strings, Carousel feels like too much talent wasted on hopeless characters whose relentlessly poor choices start out sympathetic but quickly turn gratuitous and wind up simply tiresome. MacRae's marvelous performance of the anxious ode to impending fatherhood "Soliloquy" is the highlight, and the entire movie is visually quite toothsome, but the dance extravaganza "June is Coming Out All Over" comes off as mere filler, failing to move the story or otherwise meaningfully distract from this small town's army of exceedingly gay fishermen, and most of the other numbers are pleasant but musically unremarkable. Carousel is given fine treatment in Fox's two-disc "50th Anniversary Edition." On the first disc, the feature is presented in a glorious anamorphic transfer (2.55:1) with audio remastered in Dolby Digital 5.1. As on the Oklahoma DVD, Shirley Jones is joined in a terrific commentary by film historian Nick Redmond, during which some discussion is given to Frank Sinatra's legendary late withdrawal from the male lead role, and the movie is also viewable in both score-only and sing-a-long modes. Disc Two of the set includes the full 1934 Fritz Lang drama Liliom (93 min., in French with English subtitles), plus the 23-min. featurette "Turns On The Carousel," recreations of the deleted songs "You're A Queer One Julie Jordan" and "Blow High, Blow Low," excerpts of the original Broadway cast performing "If I Loved You" and "You're A Queer One Julie Jordan," a Fox Movietone Newsreel about the film's premiere, still galleries, and a trailer. Dual-DVD slimline keep-case, or slimcase in Fox's "Rodgers and Hammerstein Collection" box-set.

With an astounding winning streak uninterrupted from their revolutionary 1995 debut Toy Story through 2004's Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios were due a hiccup. While 2006's hit Cars is just as technically adroit and visually stunning as the studio's six previous features, it's not nearly as solid in the areas that distinguished its predecessors from other computer-animated films: story and character. Set in a world occupied by anthropomorphized vehicles, Cars tells the tale of cocky rookie race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a selfish up-and-comer desperate for a premier endorsement. However, while en route to a career-making race, Lightning is arrested for recklessly tearing up the desolate town of Radiator Springs and is forced into labor to pay for the damage. Once he resigns himself to his punishment, the good old cars of Radiator Springs begin to puncture Lightning's shallow veneer of self-importance, and Lightning not only grows to love the natural beauty of the dying Route 66 tourist spot, but he also learns some valuable racing tricks from an old-time has-been with a crusty heart of chrome (Paul Newman). Director John Lasseter (who co-directed with Joe Ranft, and co-wrote with Ranft and eight others) describes Cars as a very personal project inspired by his childhood love of cars, and the movie is full of cute references and automotive in-jokes, but the screenplay fails to relay any substantial inspiration. The theme of old-discarded-for-new is a sentiment recycled from the far superior Toy Story franchise, only this time recast with a few familiar sports clichés. The film's major pothole, however, is that Lightning is a poor protagonist, cut from the tired Tom Cruise archetype of brash hot shots who reluctantly learn to care for others, and the film's animators fail to make their mechanical subjects humanly expressive enough to surmount such an obstacle to empathy. Further, the motorized milieu manifests in a noisy and aggressive style, devoid for at least the first half of the movie of the small charms that informed previous Pixar productions, so by the time Lightning begins his heroic turn and the movie becomes more engaging, it's hard to muster much interest in the outcome. Also with voices by Bonnie Hunt, Larry The Cable Guy, Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, Guido Quaroni, Jenifer Lewis, Paul Dooley, Michael Wallis, George Carlin, Katherine Helmond, John Ratzenberger, Joe Ranft, Michael Keaton, Richard Petty, Jeremy Piven, Bob Costas, Darrell Waltrip, Richard Kind, Edie McClurg, H.A. 'Humpy' Wheeler, Tom Magliozzi, Ray Magliozzi, Lynda Petty, Andrew Stanton, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Michael Schumacher, Jay Leno, and Mario Andretti. Buena Vista's DVD release of Cars offers an excellent anamorphic transfer (2.39:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 EX and Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround audio. Extras include the new animated short "Mater and the Ghostlight," the Academy Award-nominated animated short "One Man Band," plus a featurette about John Lasseter's inspiration for Cars (16 min.) and four deleted (and never fully drawn) scenes. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/c/cashcrop.q.shtml

Martin Scorsese's third film set in the world of organized crime, Casino (1995), received mostly muted praise following the avalanche of hyperventilated superlatives dropped on his previous gangster movie, Goodfellas (1990). While in many ways Casino matched its predecessor's marvelous aesthetic fluidity and kinetic, violent energy, it was perhaps too similar to the earlier film not to suffer a backlash from burned-out critics. Scorsese re-teamed, after all, with Goodfellas' co-writer Nick Pileggi for this true-crime tale, and he cast Goodfellas alumni Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, the latter in a role strikingly similar to his 1990 Oscar-winning Tommy DeVito. However, despite Casino's handicap of familiarity, its narrative is, in some ways, more satisfying. Based (with names changed) on the true story of the mob's final decade in control of Las Vegas in the 1970s, Casino stars De Niro as Sam 'Ace' Rothstein, a brilliant Jewish gambler hand-picked by a midwest crime family to operate the Tangiers casino. An acute player of angles, Ace sees this new role as the opportunity to ply his talents in the legitimate world of legal gambling and plays it as straight he can, given the massive cash-skimming operation going on behind the scenes to the benefit of his bosses. Rothstein's sharp instincts, low profile, and quest for integrity successfully keep the heat at bay, until his old Chicago pal (and made man) Nicky Santoro (Pesci) relocates to Vegas and instantly earns a reputation for his impetuous and violent criminal activities. Ace complicates an increasingly precarious situation when he falls for a greedy, hustling bombshell (Sharon Stone) and convinces her to marry him, despite her dedication to a low-life pimp and druggie (James Woods).

*          *          *

Of the nearly 20 major animated features produced by Walt Disney during the 30 years after the revolutionary debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, a handful of those titles have come to represent the standard bearers of classic animation. The initial post-Snow White explosion of Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) cemented Disney's reputation for incredible artistry and vision, but also left the studio struggling and nearly bankrupt. The movie credited with turning around the Disney fortune and fastening Disney's name in the firmament of family entertainment is the iconic and beautiful, but far less ambitious and consistent, 1950 feature Cinderella. Based on the European folk tale, as popularized by Charles Perrault, Cinderella tells of an eponymous heroine enslaved by her cruel stepmother and stepsisters, neglected, abused, and relegated to the position of a lowly scullery maid. With the aid of a spell from her fairy godmother, the kindly Cinderella is magically transformed for one night into an exquisitely appointed maiden. As such, she snags the heart of a bachelor prince; but as the spell fades, Cinderella flees back to her wretched life, leaving behind a glass slipper which the prince uses to track down his mysterious love. As with any rags-to-romance story of a triumphant underdog, Cinderella had a lot going for it even before Disney's excellent artists ever lifted a pencil. Much of the realization, naturally, is quite wonderful, especially Cinderella's surreal daydreams and her first taste of romance at the Prince's ball. The character Cinderella is drawn with empathetic grace and sweetness, and her evil stepmother is given an indelibly malevolent visage, defining the archetype for years to come. The songs in Cinderella, as well, are among the very best of any Disney feature, with mesmerizing melodies and sophisticated lyrics by Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman. "Sing, Sweet Nightingale" and "So This is Love" are exceptionally timeless (and gorgeously sung by Cinderella's voice, Ilene Woods), despite the disparate popularity of less distinguished numbers "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo" and "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes."

But Cinderella is not all magic and wonder, with nearly half of the 74-minute narrative given over to a tiresome subplot involving a pair of cutesy, chirping mice, Jack and Gus, as they give slapstick chase to Stepmother's cat, Lucifer, while assisting Cinderella in her dreams of freedom. That this annoying plot thread is at all crucial the main story arc is evidence of Cinderella's major flaw: Its heroine, while gentle and beautiful, is unengagingly passive, depending solely on the good graces of vermin and magic to foil her wicked stepmother and free her from captivity. She's all hope and no action. This lack of will is a startling narrative weakness and saps much of the fun from her eventual salvation. The tomfoolery between the exasperated king and his Duke is also uninspired filler for an airy confection that is full of beauty but never quite earns its feature length. Not that children will mind.

*          *          *

In one of the more notorious exploitation films of the 1980s, Perry King stars in Class of 1984 (1982) as Andrew Norris, an idealistic music teacher with high aspirations for his new job at a big, inner-city high school. But his naiveté takes an immediate blow as he orients to the rough campus — where students pass through metal detectors and teachers must fill-in for an understaffed security force and police the hallways. Although a nervous biology teacher (Roddy McDowall) tries to prepare Norris for the lawless student body, the new teacher's straight-laced commitment to principle runs him afoul of a vicious student gang led by the charismatic psychopath Stegman (Timothy Van Patten). Like a Mafia boss in punk's clothing, Stegman coolly controls the school's drug and prostitution rings, and he doesn't tolerate challenges to his authority from the likes of Norris. When Norris elicits help from both the administration and the police, his pleas are met with weary resignation, but he stubbornly persists in confronting Stegman's Clockwork Orange-lite reign of terror himself. A remake of Blackboard Jungle (1955), which was a controviersial film in its day, Class of 1984 (which kicks off with a depressingly anemic title anthem from Alice Cooper) is strictly pedestrian stuff during its first half, adding just enough sensationalism to overcome its prosaic writing and lack of style. King, who would become a minor TV star a few years later on the series "Riptide," is believably earnest, but dull, and only Van Patten's malevolent charm and McDowall's scenery-chewing neuroses distinguish it. But director Mark Lester, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Holland (who would later write and direct cult favorites Fright Night and Child's Play), pulls off a searing second-half rally as the conflict between teacher and student escalates from mere posturing to unrestrained violence. At times brutal and irredeemable (particularly a crucial, almost unwatchable scene in which Stegman's gang terrorize Norris' pregnant wife, played by Merrie Lynn Ross), the last act of Class of 1984 is bold, gripping, and cathartic, and elevated to a level of bloody hysteria that transports its admonishing intentions to a ridiculous frenzy that more than earns its lasting cult status. While Van Patten, fresh from the daring TV series The White Shadow, is the unparalleled star of Class of 1984, he made little subsequent mark as a performer, becoming instead a major TV director, finding his niche at HBO helming several episodes of "Sex and the City," "The Wire," "Deadwood," "Rome," and "The Sopranos" (for which he also wrote the series finest single episode, "The Pine Barrens"). Only chubby bit player Michael J. Fox emerged from the young cast as a considerable star. Stegman flunkies Stefan Arngrim and Lisa Langlois do a good job making their fairly anonymous characters stand out. Director Lester leveraged his clout from the movie's notoriety for three shots at a studio career, directing the disappointing Steven King adaptation Firestarter (1984) , the Arnold Schwarzeneggar hit Commando (1985), and the miserable comedy flop Armed and Dangerous (1986), before slipping back into Z-movie obscurity. Anchor Bay presents Class of 1984 in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1). Lester provides an interesting commentary track, and this disc also includes the very good 25-minute retrospective, "Blood and Blackboards," as well as the theatrical trailer, two TV Spots, and a poster & still gallery. Keep case in paperboard sleeve.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 1 Jan 2003 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (0 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/c/clerks.q.shtml
EDITION: Collector's Series

Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman make for explosive nemeses in this typically tense 1995 submarine-bound military thriller. When a renegade Russian general seizes control of a nuclear missile base in the destabilized post-Cold War republic, the U.S. Navy deploys nuclear submarines to prepare for a preemptive strike should he follow through on his blustery, apocalyptic rhetoric. Washington stars as Lt. Commander Ron Hunter, the newly assigned Executive Officer of the USS Alabama and second in command to the old-school Capt. Frank Ramsey (Hackman). While Ramsey is a no-nonsense ass-kicker unencumbered by concerns that fall outside of the chain of command, Hunter represents a new breed of hyper-educated, Ivy League naval officers who view war through the lens of not just order-and-obey, but a moral wariness informed by the dangers of the nuclear age. Early differences between the top two officers are exacerbated when the Russian splinter group is detected fueling its nuclear arsenal for launch at the U.S. within the hour, and the Alabama is ordered to strike first. After the Alabama is engaged by a hostile sub, its communications are cut off, fragmenting a subsequent launch order. Ramsey holds fast to the original order to launch, but Hunter refuses to comply on the chance that the incomplete order was meant to rescind the call for potentially disastrous nuclear engagement. Like virtually every other submarine movie in that rarefied subgenre, Crimson Tide is chock full of claustrophobic power struggles and emotionally charged mutinies, dire malfunctions and fatal floods, and lots of feverish, sweaty barking of orders into scratchy intercoms and frenzied rushings down tight gangways with flickering lights while the fate of civilization hangs in the balance. Although it is not immune to deep descents into silliness, the movie bristles with tension and energy, thanks in no small part to its two stars giving full-throated, stubborn performances as good as any in their careers. It helps also that director Tony Scott was as near-perfect a blockbuster action director as any during the last two decades of the 20th century, and, re-teamed with mega-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, he manages to make the inevitability of the movie's ending a non-factor during the well-executed thrill ride leading up to it. Also with George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen, Matt Craven, and brief appearances by Steve Zahn, Rick Schroder, James Lesure, Ryan Phillippe, Scott Grimes, and Jason Robards. Buena Vista's "Unrated Extended Edition" of Crimson Tide features about six minutes of additional footage (one quick scene of which is in particularly bad shape, as if it had been spliced in from a 20th generation VHS dupe) and is presented in a good anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. This disc also include three extra deleted scenes and the featurettes "On The Set of Crimson Tide" and "The Making of Crimson Tide." Trailers, keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/c/cruelintentions.q.shtml

Appealing English actor Julian Moore stars in this middling 2005 slasher yarn as Owen, the troubled new kid at the latest in a long string of exclusive U.S. boarding schools. Owen immediately establishes a flirty rapport with Dodger (Lindy Booth), the coy and beguiling figurehead of a mischievous clique whose bored affiliates spitefully nip at each other through secretive, divisive games. When Owen masters the current game of deceit and suspicion too easily, Dodger proposes an ambitious change in scale: take the game outside of their immediate group and appropriate a recent local murder mystery for their amusement. The students create an elaborate lie about the grisly crime, suggesting via a school-wide email that it is the latest in a serial killing spree plaguing similar private schools, including graphic personal descriptions of the fiend's previous guttings. After Owen distributes the expository email, he begins receiving threatening instant messages and nervously tries to ascertain if one of his new friends is playing on his fears, or if his rumor-mongering has reached and angered the real killer, who is bent on correcting the record. As is often the case in these days of high concept horror flicks, Cry_Wolf's set-up is needlessly complicated when what follows is mostly typical cat-and-mouse, as one by one the game's players suspiciously disappear, while those who remain can't help but don the allegedly fictional killers' trademarked garb, creating paranoia and red herrings galore. Much like Wes Craven's Scream (1996), which revived the slasher genre with the winking self-awareness expected from a cast of characters saturated by such junk culture, Cry_Wolf tries to incorporate a knowingness of slasher conventions into is plot, but it simply doesn't have the playful humor that made Craven's breakthrough so enjoyable. Moore, with his shifty but charming English insecurities, makes a promising leading man for this type of material, but there isn't enough flavor in the screenplay by Beau Bauman and director Jeff Wadlow to allow him to stand out. Booth can be fetching as the ridiculously named Dodger, but the plot's contrivances sag heavily on her shoulders, and the obligatory "twist" ending demands such laughable omniscience that it degrades any of the slight pleasures to be found prior. Also with "The Gilmore Girls" heartthrob Jared Padalecki, Jon Bon Jovi as a mysterious professor, and Gary Cole in such a useless, miniscule role that one can only guess he owed the producer a favor. Universal's "unrated" version of Cry_Wolf is presented in a fine anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The feature is accompanied by a commentary with Wadlow, Bauman, and editor Seth Gordon. Also on board are a few deleted and extended scenes, an alternate early scene with a different outcome, the featurettes "Wolves, Sheep and Shepherds: Casting the Roles" and "Behind the Scene: Enter the Sinister Set," plus a couple of early shorts by the filmmakers: the clever but unsatisfying and ultimately pretentious "Tower of Babble" and the quick and fun "Manual Labor," which won top prize at the Chrysler Extreme Filmmaking Competition. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 4 Feb 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/c/curseofthejadescorpion.q.shtml

Director Vincenzo Natali made an impression with his 1997 feature debut, the indie sci-fi sleeper Cube, which has since gained a minor cult following amongst the Internet's more pretentious aesthetic fanboys. A storyboard artist on ambitious films like Beetlejuice and Ginger Snaps, as well as the French TV series "The Adventures of Tin-Tin," it comes as little surprise that Natali would display exquisite gifts as a visualist, creating just the kind of carefully planned and strikingly executed frames that resonate with avid readers of Kafka-inspired comic books. But it appears that Natali is equally as ambitious, if not quite as successful, in picking his narratives. Natali's twisty 2002 thriller Cypher, written by Brian King, is a case-in-point. Jeremy Northam stars as Morgan Sullivan, an undistinguished Wisconsin nebbish who, apparently hoping for a dramatic turn in the drab course of his life, enlists as an industrial spy for a powerful corporation. Sullivan is given a secret identity ("James Thursby") and dispatched on a series of seemingly pointless espionage missions, transmitting the contents of mundane lectures back to headquarters through his blinking camera pen (of course, one must wonder why most of the "secret" transmitting devices in this movie visibly blink). However, true to the recent spate of hyperactive suspense thrillers, Cypher vigorously inhabits one of those impossibly fluid movie-worlds where nothing is as it seems, not even when it seems like the opposite of what you thought it was seeming like the opposite of. Although Natali's approach sometimes verges on the ponderous — and, with the help of King's stilted dialogue and Northam's nasally affected performance, swims in a constant reflecting pool of artifice — the script's mildly clever (and yet often too vague) hyper-twists and meta-turns come quickly enough to anaesthetize deal-breaking reactions of indignant disbelief to its more preposterous elements. As slightly futuristic, independent psychological thrillers go, Cypher is much better than most of its peers, in that it manages to augment its technical skill with a frequently diverting story, and, perhaps by fortune more than by design, unsatisfyingly excuses the more awkward components of its execution with its final zig-zag. Cypher, despite some definite quality and atypical ambition, is overall insubstantial. Truer in substance to its title than for its own good, Natali's movie is a long shot away from delivering a fraction of the memorable detail and magnetism of the much better films it emulates — and frequently evokes — like David Fincher's The Game and Fight Club, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, and Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects. Also with Lucy Liu. Buena Vista's DVD release features a solid anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. No extras, keep-case.

While atmosphere has certainly been a crucial ingredient to the success of many a horror film, Jaume Balagueró's 2002 effort Darkness aptly demonstrates that atmosphere alone does not suffice. Anna Paquin stars as an American teen struggling to adjust to her family's new life in Spain. Foreign relocation, actually, is the smallest of her many problems: Her sensitive younger brother (Stephan Enquist) is withdrawn, covered in mysterious bruises, and obsessed with producing a series of violent drawings. Her high-strung father (Iain Glen) is beginning to experience reoccurrences of a decade-dormant mental condition that results in debilitating fits and violent outbursts. Her headstrong mother (Lena Olin) refuses to acknowledge the possibility of trouble in the family. If that weren't enough to haunt the moody heroine, her family's old and isolated house may also be inhabited by the ghosts of six children murdered 40 years ago as part of a grisly occult sacrifice. Right from the frantically edited opening credits, one suspects that director Balagueró (who co-wrote the screenplay with Fernando de Felipe) is leaning a little too heavily on aesthetics to conjure mood. His visuals are slick but only artificially horror movie-like, not dissimilar to the food-like qualities of processed "food." Darkness features all of the familiar sensory triggers, but, despite the promising casting of the likable Paquin as the movie's emotional anchor, he never molds adequate material to warrant the service of his style, and the whole enterprise falls flat as a result. Paquin is as good as could be exepcted, and both Enquist and suave veteran Giancarlo Giannini also acquit themselves well, despite the writers' lack of regard for motivation. The uninspired screenplay is so beholden to the horror-mystery formula that it only distinguishes itself with its relatively sparse dialogue. Fans of bad horror movies might eke some amusement from the gratuitously nondescript boyfriend character Carlos (Fele Martínez), whose presence in the movie is absolutely pointless until the final few un-shocking minutes. While the script's familiar concept (The Amityville Horror would organically spring to mind if it weren't mentioned on the DVD packaging) holds some potential for thrills, the hollow, predictable, and exposition-laden scenario undermines that slim promise. Darkness is not only not scary in the least, it is barely memorable, which might be its strongest asset. Buena Vista's "Unrated Version" DVD release doesn't contain any material that would ruffle a mild R-rating, so don't expect any illicit thrills. The film is presented in a good anamorphic transfer (2.40:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Extras include a behind-the-scenes featurette and a theatrical the trailer. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Tue, 30 May 2006 15:01:31 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (1 star)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/d/datemovie.q.shtml
SUMMARY: The picture is essentially a short film padded to feature-length by Seltzer's excruciating proclivity for drawing out decent throwaway gags for minutes-on-end until the sheer unfunniness of the execution overwhelms the conceptual promise, if any.

At first, movie parodies may seem deceptively easy to cobble together. With an onslaught of silly pop-cultural gags at the forefront, potentially tricky elements of plot and character are lesser priorities and conveniently cribbed from other, original movies that are already part of the cultural consciousness. Any spoof half as successful as the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker classics Airplane, Top Secret or The Naked Gun is bound to deliver a wealthy share of humor to offset its misses, right? Wrong. Writer-director Aaron Seltzer proves just how tough the parody genre can be in Date Movie (2006) by not only summoning barely enough gags to populate a 75-min. movie, but also taking the few gags that do work and belaboring them until brief amusement transmogrifies into searing pain. In this wayward send-up of movie romances, Alyson Hannigan stars as Julia Jones, an overweight waitress whose inner beauty attracts the Hugh Grant-ish Grant (Adam Campbell). After a magically slimming makeover, Julia snares Grant and the two begin planning their wedding, bringing together their wacky families and also Grant's slutty ex (Sophie Monk), who wants him back.

Date Movie pays extended homage to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Hitch, the Meet the Parents franchise, and My Best Friend's Wedding, with less substantial nods to Shallow Hal, Pretty Woman, the TV series "The Bachelor," Bridget Jones's Diary and others, plus additional references to general pop phenomena like Napoleon Dynamite and The Lord of the Rings. Seltzer seems to be making a career out of half-assed Zucker-worship, co-writing 1997's Spy Hard and the first in the blockbuster horror-spoofing Scary Movie series (both with co-writer Jason Friedberg, who also shares the shame of Date Movie's lackluster laughs), but shows even less acuity for the craft as a director than he does as a writer. While most successful parodies lampoon otherwise serious subjects (like disasters, espionage, serial killers, etc.), Date Movie starts with the handicap of trying to spoof other comedies, and as a result usually settles for crass revisions of its subjects' original jokes, and rarely bests them for humor. This unfortunate obstacle further aggravates Date Movie's weakest link: its dearth of material. If it weren't for 12 gag-free minutes of closing credits, Date Movie would clock in at a mere 73 minutes, but the experience is by no means brisk. The picture is essentially a short film padded to feature-length by Seltzer's excruciating proclivity for drawing out decent throwaway gags for minutes-on-end until the sheer unfunniness of the execution overwhelms the conceptual promise, if any. Often, this padding includes scenery-chewing mugging — fatally undermining the deadpan successes of the Zucker model — telegraphed reverses, belabored jibes at other movie stars (an extended sequence, for example, reiterates the nearly 10-year-old punchline that Jennifer Lopez has a notable backside), and clumsy sight gags. That every single joke in Date Movie is stretched until weary is made even more exasperating by the wealth of more serious, parody-ripe targets that Seltzer and Friedberg overlook, like über-chick flicks The Notebook, Titanic, and any number of disease-of-the-week tearjerkers starting with the mother of all them all, Love Story (or, for pop culture posterity, Brokeback Mountain). If anything, Date Movie should be bursting with too much material but for its creators' lack of enterprise. Sadly, Hannigan, who sorely needs a good movie role to expand on her charming TV appearances, doesn't find the material here to advance her much beyond the dismal American Wedding. Also with Fred Willard, Eddie Griffin (whose "Greek" hair and eyebrows are the movie's most understated and effective gag), Carmen Electra, Tom Lenk, and Jennifer Coolidge.

Although Season Four of the WB's prime time teen soap was pleasantly less precocious than its predecessors, the following Fifth Season mostly squanders that new momentum with its lackluster redux of the show's now-stale dramatic devices, and an unfortunate return to insipid sentimentality. As the interminably wishy-washy quartet of Dawson (James Van Der Beek), Joey (Katie Holmes), Pacey (Joshua Jackson) and Jen (Michelle Williams) leave the comforts of high school for life beyond, Dawson's Creek gets a change of scenery (with Boston now the primary location), but dramatically the show is treading water, especially as regards Dawson's and Joey's half-assed, will-they-won't-they courtship, which has devolved from the series' lynchpin of romantic tension to an obligatory, aching bore. For the most part, Season Five concerns itself with the group's chronic self-sabotaging of relationships, with the award for Most Lackadaisical Break-Up going to Dawson and Jen, who hook-up just long enough for Dawson to finally lose his cherry, freak out their friends, and then dissolve back into sleepwalking twits. The introduction of Busy Phillips (of Freaks & Geeks) as Joey's brassy roommate Audrey sparks some life into the show, and her match-up with Pacey is the season's most satisfying storyline; other new characters are not so interesting, such as Chad Michael Murray's pillow-headed lothario who seduces Jen and then preys on Joey, or Dawson's hyper filmmaking partner Oliver (Eddie Doling), or Sherilynn Fenn's brief appearance as Pacey's skanky boss. Few of these new antagonists ever transcend their function as plot devices, and even then require lapses in motivation on the part of the main characters to deliver on their purpose. Meredith Salinger has a nice bit as a film critic who gets personally involved in Dawson's career. As usual, the performances by Holmes and Jackson are good, Van Der Beek is solid as the show's unfortunately gooney namesake, and Williams is not as aggressively annoying as in seasons past. Kerr Smith is also fine as Jack, this year challenged with reconciling his homosexuality with frat life, and proving in the process that "gay" does not always mean "happy." The season hits low points with two "very special" episodes, one involving the death of regular cast member and another a mugging, both of which delve head-first into the thick sap of self-seriousness, which has never been the show's strong suit, and is made quite painful by the typically obvious, hack-like approach of the show's directing staff. Columbia TriStar's Dawson's Creek: The Complete Fifth Season presents 23 episodes on four discs, each in 1.33:1 full-frame transfers with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. While previous season sets have included excellent, engaging commentaries by rascally producer Paul Stupin, that feature has been discontinued and is not included with Season Five. Four-disc digipak.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 28 Jun 2004 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (2 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/d/dawsonscreek.season03.q.shtml

"If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself." Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) makes this sober request on the last day of high school, 1976. He's not your typical depressed teenager, however; he's the popular incoming-senior quarterback in a gridiron-crazy Austin, Texas suburb. His teammates revere him, the girls love him, and, if he plays ball — and signs a team pledge eschewing beer and drugs — he can write his own ticket anywhere in town.

Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) is an incoming-freshman, and he regards the liberating promise of summer with a steady sense of dread. Freshmen in this town are subjected to degrading and violent hazing rituals at the hands of the seniors; the girls are harassed, smeared with condiments, and run through a car wash in an open-bed pickup, and the boys are hunted down and viciously swatted with thick, wooden paddles. Mitch is singled out and given the worst of the day's beatings, until sympathetic Floyd takes him under his wing and invites him out to party.

Dazed and Confused too easily slips into the genre of raucous, drug-filled, good-old-days, coming-of-age pictures to receive the credit it deserves as a mature and complicated dissection of the peer pressures and rebellious aimlessness of youth. On its sleeve, the movie is swift and funny, filled with hi-jinks, the best of the period's party rock music, and lots of teens engaging in controlled substances and talking about — not having — sex. But it's underneath this buoyant and light-hearted veneer that writer-director Richard Linklater subtly and meaningfully examines his characters.

Mitch and Floyd are essentially the same character, split only by three years of high school experience. Mitch, a likable innocent, is just being introduced to the rituals of humiliation and oppression — intricately enjoined with his ensuing popularity — that have left Floyd jaded. Mitch endures his hazing reluctantly, but bravely, and is rewarded with the attentions of a pretty sophomore and a night of beer-filled celebration. Floyd, meanwhile, seeks release from the pressure of his teammates and belittling coaches by hanging with a rowdy group of pot-smokers deemed unacceptable company for someone of his promise. The oldest of this group, Wooderson (a sublime early performance by Matthew McConaughey), is a former football-hero a few years out of high school — in age only. His carefree demeanor (really a desperate cling to adolescence) appeals to Floyd — and, in turn, Mitch. He is the third stage in the Mitch-Floyd evolution, and a warning sign on the sad road to nowhere

The beautiful success of Dazed and Confused is how Linklater presents it all with a touch so light and humorous, the gravity is hardly felt. Instead of looking in on this assembly of searching and lost youth from the ponderous point-of-view of adulthood, he looks at it from the inside-out. Unlike his contemporary follow-up film Suburbia, none of the teens in Dazed and Confused try to sort out their lives in pretentious monologue. To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola, Dazed and Confused isn't about high school. It is high school. Nobody (save Adam Goldberg, in a hilarious and moving performance) dwells on their problems. There's a big party going on. They'd rather grab a beer and tune out.

The young ensemble cast is terrific: London, Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Sasha Jenson, Rory Cochrane, Marissa Ribisi, Christin Hinojosa, Michelle Burke, Cole Hauser, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, as well as Ben Affleck and Parker Posey as two seniors a wee overzealous in hazing the newbies.

*          *          *

Universal's "Flashback Edition" of Dazed and Confused presents the film in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with audio in Dolby Digital 5.1. It includes 15 minutes of deleted scenes which, like most reels of deleted scenes, testify to the skill of the film's editor and the good judgment of the director. Also included are a 5-minute parody of anti-marijuana public service films, plus a pair of real PSAs, one warning against the spread of VD, and the other the famous "crying Indian" anti-pollution spot. They're a little strange as bonuses to accompany this particular film, but enjoyable nonetheless. Trailer, keep case in shiny paperboard sleeve. Also available in "The Ultimate Party Collection," a 2-pak including Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

n his first three feature films, director Richard Linklater established himself as uniquely acute anthropologist of post-counter-culture youth. His striking 1991 indie debut, Slacker, earned a cult following for its free-associating depiction of over-educated and disaffected college town riff-raff, and 1995's Before Sunrise eked a resonating and realistic romance out of the milieu of pretentious backpackers wandering pointlessly around Europe. But it was Linklater's second feature, the American Graffiti-like Dazed and Confused, in 1993 that stands as his most stimulating and profound snapshot of how young people inhabit their time and place.

On the last day of high school in 1976, in a suburb of Austin, Texas, the juniors of Lee High School assume their reign as the new senior class by subjecting the incoming freshmen to the same humiliating — and sometimes brutal — rites of passage they endured four years earlier. Freshman boys are hunted and mercilessly swatted with thick wooden paddles by their aggressively macho elders, while the incoming girls deemed most promising are subjected to sexually degrading insults by their upperclasswomen. When the hazing's over, the partying begins, and Freshmen Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) and Sabrina (Christine Hinojosa) are invited to cruise with the newly anointed rulers of the school through a night of drinking, mischief, drugs and hormones.

Dazed and Confused too easily slips into the genre of raucous, drug-filled, good-old-days, coming-of-age pictures to receive the credit it deserves as a mature and complicated dissection of the peer pressures and rebellious aimlessness of youth. On its sleeve, the movie is swift and funny, filled with hi-jinks, the best of the period's party rock music, and lots of teens engaging in controlled substances and talking about (yet never actually having) sex. But it's underneath this buoyant and light-hearted veneer that writer-director Richard Linklater subtly and meaningfully examines this culture and how it affects his characters.

The cruel hazing rituals employed by the seniors are rough vehicles of acceptance, rejection, control and release — manifestations of the greater pressures felt by these teenagers at the paradoxical age where everything is both certain and uncertain, and the adults who assume authority over them engage in more subtle versions of the same tactics. The freshmen subjects are, through these initiation rites, being transformed from innocents into players, learning the rules of engagement for post-pubescent combat (most of which is psychological) and, later, adulthood.

Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), uncomfortably shouldered with the expectation of quarterbacking the school's varsity football team to success the next fall, is ordered by his coaches to sign a pledge against using drugs. He stubbornly rejects this pressure by hanging with a rowdy group of pot-smokers. When confronted by his equally rowdy teammates, Floyd (half-)soberly laments, "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself." Mitch is Floyd-in-progress: a star pitcher who, despite his youth, effortlessly meshes with the older kids, and looks forward, wide-eyed, to the same high school experience that has left Floyd jaded and tuning out.

The future of the Mitch-Floyd continuum is Wooderson (a sublime debut by Matthew McConaughey), a former football-hero a few years out of high school — in age only. His carefree demeanor (a desperate cling to adolescence?) appeals to Floyd — and, in turn, Mitch — even though his realization in adulthood is ultimately uninspiring. Linklater is carefully vague about this evolution, leaving provocative questions marks where other filmmakers might have forced sterile messages about the glory of rebellion or the sad road to nowhere. Floyd sees his own resistance to authority as a victory, but if Wooderson redux is the outcome, is this just indulgent instant-gratification with negative long term consequences? As the movie's unusual and stunning final shot conveys, Floyd's view down the road is shallow, and what lies beyond even the small hills ahead is barely a concern.

The beautiful success of Dazed and Confused is how Linklater presents it all with a touch so light, free-spirited and humorous, the gravity is hardly felt. Instead of looking in on this assembly of searching and lost youth from the ponderous point-of-view of adulthood, he looks at it from the inside-out. Unlike his follow-up film Suburbia, none of the teens in Dazed and Confused try to sort out their lives in pretentious, self-aware monologue. As teens, their self-perception is naturally distorted. To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola, Dazed and Confused isn't about high school. It is high school. Nobody (save Adam Goldberg, in a hilarious and moving performance) dwells on their problems to excess. There's a big party going on. They'd rather grab a beer and tune out.

The young ensemble cast is terrific: London, Goldberg, Anthony Rapp, Sasha Jenson, Rory Cochrane, Marissa Ribisi, Michelle Burke, Cole Hauser, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, as well as memorable early turns by Ben Affleck and Parker Posey as two seniors a wee overzealous in hazing the newbies. What's surprising is that more of these appealing young actors haven't become more familiar over the last decade.

*          *          *

Those not already addled by intoxicants may feel dazed and a bit confused by the variety of DVD editions of this movie. This Criterion Collection release of Dazed and Confused is the third release (so far), following Universal's early barebones release and 2004 "Flashback Edition," which included a smattering of extras and 1970s-themed supplements, few of which are included here. This two-disc Criterion release includes a new high-definition digital anamorphic transfer (1.85:1), supervised by Linklater and cinematographer Lee Daniel, and both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mixes. The feature is accompanied on Disc One by an engaging Linklater commentary, 25 minutes deleted scenes (10 more minutes than featured on the "Flashback Edition"), and the original trailer.

Disc Two features the fine new 50-minute documentary "Making Dazed," which includes lots of cast footage and extensive coverage of the movie's difficult straddling of the indie/studio line, and 23 minutes of audition footage (including London reading for Rapp's role, but, unfortunately, does not include any of the many now-famous actors who did not get cast). This disc's "Beer Bust at the Moon Tower" section includes an additional two hours of material than can be watched via an index or randomized. This group of extras includes 40 minutes of fairly dull "character interviews" (not in-character) as the actors prepare during rehearsals, 47 minutes of additional cast-and-crew interviews at various stages of production, and a half-hour of "behind-the-scenes" footage, which includes just a few minutes from the movie's 10-year reunion party. The set also comes with a 72-page book featuring essays, character profiles, memories of the film from cast and crew, plus a fold-out poster featuring the original poster art.

When the first wave of serious dramas about the Vietnam War hit theaters in 1978, Michael Cimino's epic The Deer Hunter was the surprise hit of the lot, performing exceedingly well at the box office for a three-hour downer, and also picking up the Oscar for Best Picture the next year. While his contemporaries opted to focus singularly on either the battlefront (The Boys in Company C, Apocalypse Now) or the emotional aftermath of the controversial Southeast Asian conflict (fellow 1978 Oscar-winner Coming Home), Cimino — with only one previous directorial credit under his belt, 1974's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot — boldly attempted to cover the entire spectrum, telling the story of a group of Clairton, Penn., steel workers from days before their enlistment, through their hellish experience as POWs, and their struggle to cope with injury and trauma following the war's messy conclusion. As such, The Deer Hunter is a movie of three distinct, roughly hour-long parts, the best of which, by far, is the first, as serious Michael (Robert De Niro) and easy-going Nick (Christopher Walken) wildly celebrate the marriage of their tightly wound friend Steven (John Savage) the day before the three of them join the U.S. Army for service in Vietnam. While Steven is allowed a one-night honeymoon, Michael and Nick take the rest of their rambunctious, hard-drinking buddies (John Cazale, George Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren) on a farewell hunting trip, where Michael regains his focus and the no-nonsense attitude that has made him a beacon of responsibility in his circle of friends.

In The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino takes the objective style and intimate texture of docudrama and splashes them across cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond's beautiful, epic canvas. With brilliant, naturalistic performers (including Meryl Streep as Walken's girlfriend, Linda) improvising at their best, and the flavorful backdrop of a small-town, industrial, Russian Orthodox immigrant community, the film is, in parts, the most moving and effective of cinematic slices-of-life. Sadly, the second part of the picture (and, thankfully, the shortest), as Michael, Nick, and Steven endure a nightmarish Vietnam experience, is nearly incoherent. The movie's intense signature scenes — POWs forced to compete in deadly games of Russian roulette — leave a powerful emotional imprint that compensates for the surprisingly inept storytelling immediately surrounding them. The Deer Hunter gets partially back on track for the final hour as Michael returns home and experiences difficulty assimilating back into a quiet, blue-collar life, despite the distraught Linda's best efforts to comfort him. When Michael feels compelled to find Steven and Nick and bring them back to Clairton, the results are, respectively, heart-wrenching and ham-fisted. Cimino, who served in Vietnam as a medic for a Green Beret unit, nevertheless fails in depicting the Vietnam battlefield experience in anywhere near as riveting and authentic a fashion as he does the quieter, tender, smaller, and far more powerful scenes set in Clairton.

*          *          *

Paradoxically, The Deer Hunter would have been improved, but likely would have been less celebrated, without any scenes set in Vietnam itself — in particular Michael's unfocused, often silly, return to Saigon to fetch the AWOL Nick. The controversial Russian roulette sequences were the shocking catalyst that catapulted the movie into cultural posterity, but the great scenes in the film are so delicately created, captured, and resonant — and De Niro, Walken and Streep are so, so very good — that they effectively obscure its substantial weaknesses. Cimino also ends the movie on just such a high note, leaving a better lasting impression than perhaps the picture deserves. Upon its release, The Deer Hunter came under fire not only for questions about its historical veracity (Cimino has tried deflect criticism of the Russian roulette sequences by proclaiming them "metaphorical"), but also for its refreshingly apolitical point-of-view on the divisive war. Stanley Myers' gorgeous theme "Cavatina" is one of the all-time great pieces of movie music, and the brief hunting scenes are majestically and masterfully shot, with Zsigmond operating in peak form.

There are fewer sillier ideas in science fiction than the concept of machines developing thoughts and emotions, and yet this ludicrous trope is a firmly fixed mainstay of the genre. Silly ideas, however, can still make compelling movies, and any film festival featuring the likes of Terminator 2, Short Circuit, and Electric Dreams would be terribly remiss not include the bizarre and ham-fisted, but absurdly enthralling 1977 oddity Demon Seed. Julie Christie stars as Susan, a child psychologist in the midst of a cold separation from her brilliant husband Alex (Fritz Weaver). Following the death of their daughter from leukemia, Alex dove into his work, developing a self-teaching supercomputer, Proteus, capable of reasoning and able to overcome human limitations in researching (among virtually infinite other subjects) a cure for the disease that killed his daughter. However, in the process of work immersion Alex became detached from humanity, destroying his marriage, with Susan increasingly wary of his technologies. As Proteus is completed and turned over to its government commissioners, the massive computer questions the nature of its use and devises a secret project of its own — to break out of its confining physical parameters by gaining control of the computerized operational systems of the isolated Susan's hi-tech house, and holding her prisoner for the purpose of studying her and impregnating her. Demon Seed is overtly ridiculous in many ways, and yet it's very effective because of the seriousness with which it presents its madness. While Christie is very good as the terrorized woman experiencing several different levels of rape and, eventually, Stockholm Syndrome, the most important character in the film is Proteus itself (voiced by an uncredited Robert Vaughn). Director Donald Cammel, working with material from a novel by Dean R. Koontz, is more preoccupied with philosophy than science, and the ominous, omnipresent Proteus stalks Susan with rich, poetic taunts ("I contain all of the wisdom and ignorance of man, and yet I will never feel the sunlight on my face"). Proteus is an unapologetic egotist, refusing government requests for data that will be used for environmental destruction, and yet willing to kill thousands if it ensures the birth of its superchild. While many plot elements are loopy, and the few action sequences awkward, Cammel's irony-free commitment to the narrative sells the package as a kind of pseudo-intellectual 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Rosemary's Baby. Such a movie naturally demands a satisfying ending, and Demon Seed delivers just enough resolution, foreboding and camp to earn its claim to this goofy premise. Warner's DVD release offers a decent anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) with monaural Dolby Digital 2.0 audio. Trailer, keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Tue, 11 Mar 2003 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (3 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/d/desertbloom.q.shtml

ABC-TV scored the two most celebrated breakthrough hits of the 2004 primetime schedule, with the supernatural airplane crash drama Lost and the sexy adult soap Desperate Housewives. "Lost"'s appeal was the result of its ambitious, cinematic-quality technical prowess and eerie, unpredictable storylines, while Housewives tapped into a decidedly different pop-cultural impulse. Reclaiming the nighttime soap genre from the last decade's teen/twentysomething domination, Housewives harkens back to the reign of 1980s pulpmasters "Dallas" and "Dynasty" as it revels in the tawdry secrets of a wealthy suburban neighborhood on idyllic Wisteria Lane. Creator However, Marc Cherry's show updates the formula of its benefactors with a veneer of knowing farce, infused with the anthropological wit and ersatz feminism of "Sex and the City" but diluted by the dull slapstick and situational gaggery of Blake Edwards. Desperate Housewives is narrated by Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) — a loving wife, devoted mother, and member of close group of neighborhood women — who kills herself during the pilot episode's opening moments. As Mary Alice's friends (Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman, and Eva Longoria) attempt to unravel the mystery behind Mary Alice's shocking exit, so are revealed a variety of other Wisteria Lane secrets, ranging from the sensational — adultery, blackmail, arson, murder — to the mundane — marital struggles, perils of child rearing, career frustrations.

The central conceit of Desperate Housewives is the popular Hollywood fantasy that the "conservative" suburbs, despite their facade of comfort and happiness, are really a sweltering storm of repression, perversion, and deception. However, the show is at its weakest when this pseudo-sociology is at its most explicit (usually during Mary Alice's often superfluous and tiresome narrations). On the other hand, the series' greatest strength lies in its ability to learn from its problems and improve on them (said narration, for example, becomes increasingly less preponderant and ponderous as the series matures). While the first six episodes clunk along, suffering from overly broad caricatures and tired farce conventions (lovers scrambling to hide from unexpected cuckolds, people being locked outside their houses while naked; etc.), the subsequent batch of episodes leading to the mid-season climax begin to reveal engaging angles of previously 2-D characters and refreshing facets of too-cynical (or too idealized) relationships. Housewives slips into some doldrums during the late-season stretch, but it pulls back together for a compelling and sometimes surprising finale that packs unexpected emotional punch. As with any series that becomes a runaway success, the cast is key to quality. Hatcher stands out as Susan, a lovelorn and klutzy single mom who steadies the series as its empathetic anchor — she, Huffman, and Cross each received Emmy nominations for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series (a miscategorization sure to annoy sitcom actresses). The male characters are just as perfectly assembled, with Steven Culp, James Denton, and Doug Savant proving exceptional foils for their desperate female counterparts. Also featuring Nicolette Sheridan, Ricardo Chavira, Mark Moses, Andrea Bowen, and brief appearances by Bob Newhart and, foreshadowing Season Two, Alfre Woodard.

*          *          *

The iconic indie singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston is one of those prolific underground, self-produced polymaths that casual contemporary music fans often hear cited as influential by their favorite artists. But Johnston's own music is so far removed from mainstream channels that most can go a lifetime without ever hearing a note of his eccentric original performances. Or when they do hear a clip of Johnston's über-lo-fi acoustical ramblings, they may just scratch their heads, laugh, and chalk his reputation up to the hip eccentricity of other artists. In one of the best recent musical documentaries, 2006's The Devil and Daniel Johnston (comparable in depth to the equally excellent DiG!), director Jeff Feuerzeig fashions an exceptional profile of this most bizarre character — whose cult-fueled career has been defined by his severe bouts with mental illness — in a portrait that should deeply touch Johnston's fans while also relating to the uninitiated why this offbeat and troubled performer is held in such high esteem by his peers. With the aid of Johnston's incessant self-memorializing in the form of voluminous home movies and cassette taped audio diaries, Feuerzeig chronicles Johnston's evolution from a precociously talented teenager whose creative derivations were not appreciated by his religious West Virginian family, to the wayward young man who accidentally stumbled into minor fame during the height of Austin, Texas's pivotal arts scene of the mid-1980s, before he reemerges in his forties as a bloated casualty of the ravaging war within his mind. Singing his rough, deeply personal songs in a shaky voice that never broke from its pre-pubescently self-absorbed tenor, the same psychological fragility that may have sabotaged Johnston's career also infused his work with the frailty that was crucial in making his homemade tales of woe so raw and resonant. As Johnston's popularity grew within musical circles — and recreational drugs began to wear away at his tenuous link with sanity — his grasp on reality withered, and he moved in and out of jail, nightclubs, and mental hospitals as his creative breakthroughs alternated with violent outbursts and long periods of medication-induced inactivity.

When director Paul Schrader screened this prequel to the 1973 horror classic for Warner Brothers brass, the studio fired him and hired action hack Renny Harlin to reshoot the story with a revised script. Harlin's effort, released theatrically in 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning, was so godawful it made John Boorman's bizarrely silly 1978 Exorcist II: the Heretic look like a serious follow-up to William Friedkin's enduring original. Harlin's dumb, hyperactive disaster brought the studio's decision to fire the more cerebral Schrader into question, and thus, with nothing to lose, Warner began to screen Schrader's completed original prequel at film festivals, eventually resulting in this DVD release. While Warner's reverse in deference to the disgraced Schrader might seem initially like humble good sportsmanship, it's more likely an attempt to rake in a few extra dollars while vindicating their decision to go a different way. Schrader's Exorcist prequel is by no means the disaster Harlin's turned out to be, but it nonetheless fails, largely due to Schrader's misguided overall conception. Stellan Skarsgard stars as Lankester Merrin, a fallen Dutch priest tormented by evils he was forced to commit by Nazis during World War II. Now an archeologist, Merrin is coerced into overseeing a mysterious dig near a remote British military outpost in Kenya, where an ornate fifth century church appears to have been erected and immediately, purposefully buried. An evil power emanating from beneath the church is awakened by the site's exploration, which begins to manifest itself physically by possessing a gimpy native outcast (Billy Crawford) and exacerbating tensions between the racist soldiers and a local tribe wary of Christianity.

*          *          *

The 1994 movie that kick-started the Farrelly Brothers' juggernaut of lowest-common-denominator comedies (including There's Something About Mary, Me, Myself & Irene, Shallow Hal) benefited from its fortunate coincidence with star Jim Carrey's meteoric rise as the king of broad comedy. Arriving in theaters the same year as Carrey's breakthroughs Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, Dumb and Dumber cemented Carrey's bona fides as a boundless physical comedian. Carrey stars as Lloyd Christmas, a cocky, but mentally deficient, limo driver who falls madly in love with a preoccupied passenger en route to the airport. When Lloyd spots Mary (Lauren Holly) leaving a briefcase in the concourse, he races to return it to her, unaware that it was an intentional ransom drop by a wife worried about her kidnapped husband. Oblivious, Lloyd and his addled pal Harry (Jeff Daniels) embark on a haphazard road trip from Providence, Rhode Island to Aspen, Colorado to return Mary's cash-stuffed case, unwittingly outwitting outraged kidnappers all the way. Carrey features in nearly all of Dumb and Dumber's brightest moments, but his extraordinary presence doesn't always raise the quality of the ordinary material. Idiots the caliber of Lloyd and Harry should make for much richer comic material than writer-director team Peter and Bobby Farrelly manage to elicit, but too often they settle for mundane stupidity (like geographical confusion over the location of Aspen) and belabored grossness (a woeful diarrhea sequence, for example, is far too graphic and longwinded). As they would show in subsequent movies, the Farrellys equal their proclivity for inspired zaniness with their sloppy presentation of more abundant lesser humor, and a sense of laziness often reduces their more promising concepts to muddled mediocrities. Lloyd and Harry's stupidity fluctuates wildly from mere bad luck to half-ass delusion to incapacitating incompetence, indicating a lack of coherent forethought on the part of the creators, but enough laughs squeak through the disorganization to suffice. Also features Mike Starr, Karen Duffy, Charles Rocket, Teri Garr, NHL star Cam Neely, and Harland Williams, none of whom distinguish themselves. New Line's Dumb and Dumber: Unrated Edition ("More dumber than evur!") presents the feature in a decent anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with audio in DTS 6.1 Discrete, Dolby Digital 5.1 EX, and Dolby 2.0 Surround. The barely navigable special features menu includes 10 sequences of deleted scenes (some of which appear to be no more than poor improvisation riffs) plus two alternate endings, a retrospective documentary that is a little too reverent for its subject, TV spots and trailers, and a couple of Easter eggs that are easier to navigate than the official features. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 12 Apr 2004 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (2 1/2 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/e/eatingraoul.q.shtml

After indulging a pretentious diversion with 2001's quizzical remake Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe returns to his genially quirky comfort zone with Elizabethtown (2005), an original dramedy that echoes Crowe's Jerry Maguire (1996) but fails to match that blockbuster's coherence or star-power. Orlando Bloom stars as Drew Baylor, an athletic shoe designer whose brainchild model, the "Späzmotica," was intended to revolutionize footwear, but, after eight long years in expectant development, is being recalled before its official release, costing its major footwear company Mercury upwards of $1 billion. As Drew's stoic boss "Phil" (Alec Baldwin) tells him, shortly before firing him, "This once highly anticipated product may actually cause an entire generation to return to bare feet." A workaholic facing comprehensive failure, Drew plans a grisly suicide, but before he can impale himself he receives phone call that yanks him out of his self-obsession and back into the world of his neglected family. Learning that his father has died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack while visiting relatives in Kentucky, Drew is sent by his scattered mother and sister to collect and cremate the body and bring the remains back to Oregon. Drew's reunion with his distant relatives — and his fractured memories of his dad — in cozy Elizabethtown, Kent., is surreal, unsettling, and overwhelming, and he reaches out for a more stabilizing human contact. However, the only person he can get on the phone is a chatterbox flight attendant, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who persistently annoyed him on his red-eye flight to Kentucky. Drew's desperate phone call becomes a marathon all-nighter discussion of hopes, fears, philosophies, and flirting. When the two finally meet, they begin an unusual whirlwind romance, the inevitability of which is postponed by a flurry of oddball plot-points and set-pieces. Fans of Crowe's unique sensibility and heartfelt humor may very well love Elizabethtown — it's chock-full of his unthreateningly optimistic and colorfully detailed, very personal style. But those ambivalent to Crowe's entire body of work are likely to be less tolerant of the unpredictable story's final stretch, which descends from too quirky to precious with a disastrous (in all senses) memorial service that may be recorded as Susan Sarandon's most unconvincing and affected performance. The film then veers into a strange road-trip sequence that is individually interesting and yet reeks of self-indulgence. Elizabethtown's biggest problem, however, is the miscast Bloom. A great performer in larger-the-life epics like The Lord of the Rings series and Pirates of the Caribbean, he never gets a convincing handle on this more intimate role (or his American accent), leaving the loose narrative without the crucial element of a visible character-arc to keep it together. Dunst is pleasing, but her character's intentional early grating never totally goes away, and some of her dialogue and mannerisms are too cute, wearing heavily the strains of gimmickry. There's enough to like in Elizabethtown to recommend it, but this very factor makes the movie's failures even more dismaying. Also with Judy Greer, Bruce McGill, and Loudon Wainright III. Paramount presents their "Special Collector's Edition" of Elizabethtown in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 Surround audio tracks. The supplements are not particularly outstanding, with only a couple of cast-and-crew-oriented music montages and two extended scenes. Trailer, keep-case.

With two forgettable sequels already skulking about the video store shelves like hunchbacked wallflowers, 1973's brilliant horror drama The Exorcist seemed unlikely to spawn any progeny worthy of its name. But when Warner Brothers announced that mercurial Paul Schrader — whose filmography of introverted rage, explosive violence, and spiritual suffocation includes Light Sleeper, Mishima, and Auto Focus, and screenplays for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, among others — had been hired to write and direct a prequel to William Friedkin's acclaimed classic, it appeared that the studio had finally understood that the original movie's longevity laid not with its special effects, but in the intimacy with which it explored novelist William Peter Blatty's gripping tale of the struggle between supernatural forces of good and evil. However, when Schrader turned in his version of this fourth film in the Exorcist series, he was swiftly fired and replaced by obtuse action hack Renny Harlin, who was granted license to rewrite and re-shoot the movie (at nearly twice Schrader's budget!). Rumors that Schrader's film was too psychological and lacked sufficient gore will have to wait for validation when that version premieres at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film (billed as Exorcist: The Original Prequel) just a few weeks after this 2005 DVD release of Harlin's effort. Whatever the flaws or promise of Schrader's Exorcist prequel, Harlin's is simply atrocious (and bombed accordingly). Despite the inspired casting of excellent Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård as young Lancaster Merrin (the character indelibly played by the great Swedish actor Max Von Sydow in the original film), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) is plagued throughout by Z-movie writing (by first-time scribe Alexi Hawley) and Harlin's visual artificiality. Shortly after the end of World War II, Merrin suffers a crisis of faith triggered by his first-hand experience of the horrors of Nazism and leaves the priesthood for archeology. When an ancient church is unearthed in Nairobi, Merrin is called to investigate and finds the site plagued by mysterious illnesses. With the uninspired Harlin (best known for 1993's workman-like Cliffhanger and his notorious 1995 pirate bomb Cutthroat Island) at the helm, what follows is an ordinary supernatural mystery with non-conducive cardboard characters squelching the tension. Pussywhipped by trite visual cues, Harlin is incapable of delivering anything near the resonance of Friedkin's masterful, tactile, and quietly unsettling character study. Merrin's internal struggle is relegated to furtive glances and dull expositional dialogue, and the horror of pure evil is reduced to crass shock effects (a couple of good ones) and pouncing music cues. Exorcist: The Beginning is so lifeless and its "scares" so obligatory, that it even fails to rise to the absurd entertainment value of John Boorman's ridiculously inept 1978 Exorcist II: The Heretic, which may now no longer be considered the franchise's biggest disaster. Warning to the curious: Enduring Harlin's clumsy, artless, and manipulative depiction of Nazism may make one feel dirtier than description can bear. Warner presents Exorcist: The Beginning in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with audio in DTS. This disc includes a dry commentary by Harlin (in which he promises to discuss the movie's rough production history, but never comes back to it) and an eight-minute behind-the-scenes featurette. Trailers, keep case.

As musician-turned-filmmaker vehicles go, John Mellencamp's Falling from Grace (1992) isn't half-bad, and is definitely one of the more modest efforts of its kind. Mellencamp stars in this mostly quiet kitchen-sink drama as Bud, a popular country & western singer who returns to his family's Indiana farm for the 80th birthday of his grandfather (Dub Taylor). Burned out on his music career and L.A. lifestyle, Bud pines for the idealized simplicity of midwestern small-town living, but the old emotions stirred by his return are nothing but difficult. Bud's wealth fosters drink-eased feelings of shame in the proud relatives and friends who depend on him for their livelihoods and it elicits resentment from his brutish father, Speck (Claude Akins), who practices a cruel sense of entitlement upon his offspring. Even though Bud's spunky Californian wife Alice (Mariel Hemingway) is adored by all, Bud nurses a longing for his old flame P.J. (Kay Lenz), who is now married to his brother Parker and, further complicating the emotions involved, sleeping with Speck. When Falling from Grace is occupied with leisurely capturing the local color of Oat City, it is a breezy and engaging piece of work (veteran actor Taylor is particularly fun in this regard), with Mellencamp showing a delicate touch as a director and a natural skill as an actor. However, the family melodrama, while never overplayed, sensational, or sentimental, is unexceptional and offers little or no resonance. One has to admire Mellencamp's lack of rock-star ego: even though he plays type as a singer, there are virtually no scenes of Bud in performance, and the song-filled soundtrack is far from a Mellencamp album, juking instead through succession of estimable songwriters like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, John Prine (who also appears in the movie), Leonard Cohen, and Hank Williams, with only a few songs written by Mellencamp, and only one in his voice (Mellencamp's erstwhile guitarist and songwriting partner Larry Crane also appears in the film, as Bud's half-brother Ramey, and on the soundtrack). But Mellencamp's selfless subservience to the writing is betrayed by the underperforming screenplay by Larry McMurtry, who usually works at a higher standard (See also: Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove). Nevertheless, Mellencamp showed promise both as an actor and director in his debut but, despite rave reviews from a few powerful critics, his acting appearances since have been rare, and Falling from Grace remains his only effort behind the camera to date. Columbia TriStar presents the film on DVD in a nice anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Trailers for Columbia titles, keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/f/fallinginlove.q.shtml

The most enduring high school movie of the 1980s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) is not as valuable for its big laughs as it is for perfectly evoking pre-New Wave mall and high school culture. Backed by a great early '80s song score, director Amy Heckerling's invaluable time capsule (Remember when you could smoke in a movie theater? When Pat Benatar was a fashion icon?) features some iconic characters, most notably Sean Penn's wasted surfer dude Jeff Spicoli. His scenes with ball-busting history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) are the funniest in the picture, whereas most of the remaining humor settles for standard sophomoric hijinks, usually involving drug use or sexual humiliation. Surprisingly, though, Fast Times's strength lies in its more serious moments, when it frankly but unsentimentally deals with the awkwardness of youth. Jennifer Jason Leigh, who heads the fine ensemble cast as 15-year-old Stacy, is excellent as an adolescent anxious for sexual experience, and who learns the hard way that some experiences move too fast for her to keep pace with. Adapted from his own novel by Cameron Crowe, who later wrote and directed the seminal youth-oriented movies Say Anything and Almost Famous. For reasons that need not be explained, Fast Times made Phoebe Cates a fixture in the fantasies of a generation of young males. The cast is peppered with early appearances by Judge Reinhold, Forrest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, if you look closely, Nicolas Cage (credited as Nicolas Coppola) and Eric Stoltz. Universal's "Totally Awesome Special Edition" offers a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with audio tracks in the original mono (Dolby Digital 2.0), plus remixes in DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1. The disc also includes the same features found on the previous "Collector's Edition" release of this movie: a commentary track with Heckerling and Crowe, trailers, the documentary Reliving Our Fast Times at Ridgemont High, music highlights, and a video map of hangouts in the film. Keep-case. (Also available in "The Ultimate Party Collection," a 2-pak including the new "Flashback Edition" of Dazed and Confused.)]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 18 Oct 2004 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (2 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/f/fatgirl_cc.q.shtml

The reality TV series "Project Greenlight," in its first two seasons on HBO, operated primarily as a crash course in low-budget indie filmmaking mistakes. With producers Chris Moore, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon selecting first-time directors and screenwriters from a large pool of contestants, neither of the first two resulting films (2002's Stolen Summer and 2003's The Battle of Shaker Heights), both mild coming-of-age pap for boutique studio Miramax, looked like they would be nearly as interesting as the TV series documenting their difficult productions. For its third season "Project Greenlight" moved down the cable hierarchy to Bravo, and the producers likewise ditched their inclination toward festival-fare, adding horror producer Wes Craven to the mix, and aligning with the more commercially-oriented Miramax spin-off studio Dimension. Picking the winners of this third project, the producers split with the studio on both screenplay and director, with Dimension forcing through a marketable horror screenplay (by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton) that sent Damon into indignant elitist hissy fits, and the producing team responding by assigning directorial duties to longshot John Gulager, an introverted 46-year-old camerman with a knockout reel but the self-esteem of a hairbrush. By the end of the first few production-oriented episodes of the series, the project looked absolutely hopeless, devoid of vision, saddled with a despondent director at odds with everyone, and hamstrung by a studio wary of disaster.

If "Project Greenlight" ever spawns a hit, Feast deserves first bite. A gory, funny monster siege movie in the mold of Evil Dead and From Dusk 'Til Dawn, it is an energetic and thoroughly worthwhile exemplification of its genre, proving Gulager a most surprising (and very possibly extremely lucky) first-time success story. Feast plants a miserable group of strangers in an out-of-the-way desert bar and surrounds them with mysterious, vicious, flesh-hungry creatures. From the opening scenes, Gulager shows an easy command of both horror stylistics and sharp comic timing, even though his initially fun introductory gimmick — with each character in the ensemble freeze-framed for exposition with "fun facts" and personalized music cues — drags on a little too long (which, in itself, may have been a structural gag that works in concept only, but one suspects it was more an effort to bump up Feast's just-slight 92-minute running time). However, while most genre pictures quickly slip into a by-the-numbers creative coma, after this merely amusing stutter Feast fiercely sprints non-stop through scene-after-scene of bracing, arch, gruesome, ruthless, and exciting set-pieces that never let down. At times, action scenes in Feast are so quick and chaotic they are nearly impossible for viewers to discern in real-time, but the narrative itself excuses this flaw, and it never derails the relentless fun.

Despite the well-documented casting tussles, every actor succeeds in style. Across-the-board, the terrific (and surprisingly expendable) performers make the most of the movie's gut-soaked shtick without straying outside the bounds of playing it straight. Skewering preconceptions with post-Buffy aggression, Feast's women consistently out-ball the bar's hapless male meat. Navi Rawat ("The O.C."), Krista Allen ("Baywatch"), and Jenny Wade balance sex appeal with heroine-ism, not only succeeding in giving Feast a surprising dash of heart, but also making mockeries out of the self-centered chumps played by Eric Dane, Balthazar Getty, Judah Friedlander, Duane Whitaker, and Henry Rollins (the former Black Flag screamer who, as a sign of the movie's fearless humor, wears pink sweat pants throughout the bloody climax). Also with Josh Zuckerman, Eileen Ryan, Clu Gulager (the veteran actor-dad of director John), and Jason Mewes.

*          *          *

David Cronenberg's remake of the 1958 horror favorite The Fly (1986) transformed a campy slice of sci-fi kitsch into a serious, terrifying, and heart-wrenching drama that stands on its own against great films of any genre. Makeup artist Chris Walas won a hard-earned Oscar for his exemplary efforts on Cronenberg's production and stepped up to direct a sequel so awkward and pointless that not even Walas' own makeup effects survive the overbearingly dull current of silliness running through the project. Cronenberg's The Fly ended with brilliant physicist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) a deformed victim of his own ambitions, mercifully killed by his pregnant lover, Veronica (Geena Davis), following a horrifying and tragic series of fatally flawed experiments in teleportation that resulted in the splicing of Seth's genetic and molecular structure with that of a common housefly. As The Fly II (1989) begins, Veronica (played by an actress of no discernible resemblance to Davis) dies screaming upon giving birth to a large, slimy pupa, leaving the human-looking baby who emerges to the captivity of Bartok Industries, the secretive corporate sponsor of Seth's experiments. Their offspring, Martin Brundle, grows at an accelerated rate, and by the age of five is a full-grown adult (played by Eric Stoltz) with an aptitude for science far surpassing that of the Bartok employees who raised him. Sensing Martin's growing restlessness, corporate figurehead Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson) invites the prodigy to finish his father's work. But just as Martin makes breakthroughs with his dad's teleportation experiments — as well as with his love affair with a low-level Bartok staffer (Daphne Zuniga) — he begins to mutate as the dormant insect genes inside him overcome his human cells, just in time to wreak super-insect revenge on the heartless and cynical capitalist Bartok and his cartoonily evil security guard.

The most paralyzing horror story to come out of the movie industry in the last few decades might be Hollywood's fear of new ideas. With multiplexes already sagging from sequelibrium, recent years have seen a non-stop influx of TV spinoffs and movie remakes angling for the jaded moviegoing dollar, usually offering little more than name-recognition doused in the damp humor of smug pop-culture deconstruction. One of the least ambitious strains of this recent remakery has been the recycling of classic horror movies, duly stripped and sterilized of genuine thrills and atmosphere, and fed into the meatyocrity grinder. In this current atmosphere of prefab gore it's easy to forget, then, just how good an uncynical horror remake can be. While the 1980s horror genre was overrun with franchises built around unstoppable killers Jason and Freddy, two of the movies of the decade were dynamic remakes of talky 1950s sci-fi and horror classics: John Carpenter's 1982 chilling monster yarn The Thing and David Cronenberg's astounding 1986 updating of the 1958 Vincent Price creature feature The Fly. Where Kurt Neumann's 1958 version of George Langelaan's short story "The Fly" featured a few memorable scenes and lines, its drive-in, B-movie aspirations translated into a triumph of camp over creeps, and its titular fly-headed ghoul (and the corresponding human-headed fly) is more likely to elicit titters than shivers. Director Cronenberg and co-writer Charles Edward Pogue, however, instead of simply regurgitating the same content into a slicker but soulless package, dig deep into the source material to mine an emotionally powerful story that, appropriately, melds contemporary special effects with profoundly disturbing psychological human drama and technological terror.

Jeff Goldblum gives the performance of his career as brilliant but socially awkward and isolated physicist Seth Brundle, who can't help but reveal to a pretty science journalist (Geena Davis) that he's close to completing a project that will revolutionize life as we know it: a teleportation pod that can deconstruct an object down to its molecular level and reassemble it in another pod. When Veronica threatens to turn his flaccid attempt at seduction into a career-making scoop, he persuades her to wait until he has perfected the pioneering process, after which he promises her exclusive book rights to his discovery. While the teleportation system works well with inanimate objects, it doesn't do so well with living creatures (as evidenced by a baboon that comes out of the destination pod turned gooily inside out). It takes Seth and Veronica's burgeoning love affair to inspire the epiphanous breakthrough, but when Veronica opts to visit an ex-boyfriend (Jon Getz) rather than celebrate a successful baboon teleportation, Seth decides in a drunken fit of jealousy to teleport himself before further testing, and neglects to notice when a common housefly enters the teleportation chamber with him. Not programmed to handle the teleportation of two separate subjects, the computer combines in-transit Seth's and the fly's DNA structures into one hybrid organism. Initially visibly unaltered, Seth feels revitalized by the process, stronger and more agile, energetic and powerful. But his physical appearance begins to deteriorate as he begins to shed his human features and the insect within him takes control.

*          *          *

The Fly's most remarkable qualities are inextricably tied to its three key players — David Cronenberg, Jeff Goldblum, and makeup effects master Chris Walas. Since his crude-but-effective 1975 low-budget feature Shivers, Cronenberg has been the undisputed master of biological sci-fi horror, racking up a series of fascinating, unsettling, and thoroughly original explorations of humans consumed by science, technology, and machinery (best amongst them 1976's gritty Rabid and 1979's unforgettably eerie The Brood). In many ways, The Fly is the perfect culmination of Cronenberg's key obsessions, as Brundle's conflicting human needs and emotions corrupt his hunger for discovery, and the final, unforgettably heartbreaking scene is Cronenberg at his purest, mixing horrific content with a deep sense of empathy. As always, Cronenberg's approach is patient, never in a rush to deliver cheap shocks, but letting them evolve naturally from his keenly designed character's obsession. Goldblum has always been the best in his class at delivering quirky pseudo-scientific chatter as if he were accessing organic thoughts, and the first half of The Fly plays to his most obvious strengths. But it is during the second half of the film — as he slowly transforms from a monstrously paranoid and self-obsessed man-fly into monstrous fly-like creature bitterly aching to reclaim his humanity — that he delivers one of the all-time great film performances, effortlessly exuding empathy, pathos, self-loathing, and fascinated anguish from underneath several pounds of decaying latex goo. Goldblum is so powerful as "Brundlefly" that he disarms resistance to what was a dramatic step-up in the level of gore considered stomachable in most big Hollywood pictures. And what exquisite (but never gratuitous) gore it is, with Walas creating a disturbingly authentic transformation that even in its most extreme moments never loses the echoes of humanity that make the movie so effectively potent and unprecedentedly poignant. Walas won an Oscar for Best Makeup Effects (and went on to direct a 1989 sequel, The Fly II), but neither Goldblum or Cronenberg were nominated.

Julianne Moore has been so prolific in turning out knockout performances in works of great acclaim that her filmography over the last decade is almost unequaled in artistic prestige. Starting with her stunning turn in Robert Altman's 1993 Short Cuts, Moore went on to provide breathtaking major roles in award contenders like Vanya on 42nd Street, Safe, Boogie Nights, The End of the Affair, Magnolia, Far from Heaven, and The Hours. In fact, Moore's selective career has been so impressive that it's very easy to forget that she has even more generously contributed her doubtless talents to a dubious list of high-profile stinkers, including the Madonna debacle Body of Evidence, Assassins, Nine Months, The Lost World, Hannibal, Evolution, The Laws of Attraction, and appropriately continued with 2004's aptly named thriller The Forgotten, which may be an allusion to the half of Moore's oeuvre that goes suspiciously unmentioned in her more fawning reviews. Moore stars as Telly Paretta, a Brooklyn wife mentally unraveling from what her psychiatrist (Gary Sinise) calls "paranesia": a condition that manifests in the creation of false memories — in Telly's case memories of a dead nine-year-old son who never really existed. However, this being the erstwhile suspense subgenre of "the-crazy-are-really-sane," there's naturally more to the scenario than Telly's caretakers let on, or even know. As premises go, The Forgotten shows fair promise, tapping into the emotional strength of the mother-child bond as fuel for its thrills, and with a heavyweight like Moore to give it some gravity. But as Telly enlists the reluctant aid of a former hockey player (Dominic West) with similar "false" memories of a child killed in the same plane crash as Telly's, The Forgotten quickly degenerates into a very ordinary, over-produced heart-pounder with obligatory urban chase scenes, rural hideouts, sinister government agents, wide-eyed villains, and egregiously silly bits of expository dialogue like "The truth? The goddamn truth won't fit in your brain!" The combination of veteran TV hack Gerald (Phenomenon) Di Pego's screenplay and C-movie journeyman Joseph (The Stepfather) Ruben's direction was always unlikely to imbue The Forgotten with any special qualities. Even with the help of solid supporters like Sinise, Anthony Edwards, and Alfre Woodard (in the clichéd role of a brassy New York detective who don't take no orders from no federal agents) Moore is sadly left to carry this bulky and overwrought vehicle for obtuse art director Paul D. Kelly, and she does her best. But this time her best isn't good enough. Columbia TriStar presents The Forgotten in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. This release contains two cuts of the film, the theatrical version and a slightly longer version with a few extended and deleted scenes incorporated, as well as an alternate ending that is unlikely to phase any viewer already numbed by having watched the original. These extra scenes are also available individually through the Special Features menu. Ruben and Di Pego chat far too seriously about their movie on a commentary track, and there are also a couple of featurettes for die-hard fans: "On the Set: The Making of The Forgotten" and "Remembering The Forgotten," a "deeper look into the minds behind the making of the film." Trailers, keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/f/forrestgump.shtml
EDITION: Special Collectors Edition

The publication of the best-selling novel The Fountainhead in 1943 turned author Ayn Rand into one of the most influential philosophers in American history. Despite its challenging intellectual content and difficult hero — embodying Rand's unflinching defense of rational "selfishness" — the novel became a mainstream success, one Hollywood hoped to repeat with its screen adaptation six years later. Gary Cooper stars as Howard Roark, a maverick architect so steadfast in his refusal to compromise his holistic, modernist vision that he would rather work as a driller in a granite quarry during New York's construction boom than accept tainted building projects. But Roark's commitment to his principles attracts like-minded self-made businessmen, including cynical newspaper publisher Gail Wynand (an excellent Raymond Massey), who sees in Roark the purity he himself forsook for wealth and power. Roark, passionately disinterested in criticism, accepts Wynand's employ even though his influential New York Banner nearly ruined Roark's career years earlier through a campaign orchestrated by scheming columnist Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas), who recognized Roark's solitary striking genius as a threat to his socialist policy goals. As a novel, The Fountainhead (as well as Rand's second novel, Atlas Shrugged) was crucial in illustrating for mass consumption the ideological framework that would inform the emerging Cold War's struggle between Communist collectivism and American individualism, inspiring readers notwithstanding some serious flaws; as Rand herself penned the screenplay for the film version, all of those flaws are carried over to the screen, and sometimes exaggerated by the contemporary melodramatic style. Roark, after all, may be admirable as an icon of Objectivist spirit, but he is also nearly robotic in his asceticism, and like any philosophical extremist, he's something of a killjoy. It doesn't help that Cooper looks deeply uncomfortable during the first half of the picture, never really selling the strength of Roark's convictions until the plot is in full flow, and even then he's never personally likable, suggesting to viewers that perhaps dogma alone is not enough. Even more alienating to audiences aching to empathize is Roark's soulmate, Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), a socialite so jaded by the overall triumph of mediocrity over greatness that she prefers to coddle disappointment, marrying the whorish Wynand to spite her admiring passion for Roark. The success of Rand's polemic often demands that her characters behave in baffling ways, which, coupled with director King Vidor's melodramatic flourishes, results in more than a few unintentionally ridiculous confrontations accented to the worse by Max Steiner's overbearing score. Yet, the power of Rand's ideas — particularly her disregard for the elitist snobbery of Toohey's disingenuous appeals to "the common man" he wishes to control — resonate, and her story is always interesting even though its necessary derivations from realistic human behavior betray the impracticality of her vision. Warner's DVD release of The Fountainhead, part of "The Gary Cooper Signature Collection," presents the film in a rich full-frame transfer (1.33:1 OAR) from a good black-and-white source-print and monaural audio on a Dolby Digital 1.0 track. Supplements include the cheaply produced featurette "The Making of The Fountainhead," which recounts how Rand's participation in making the film mirrored her hero's story (20 min.). Theatrical trailer, keep-case (slimcase in the box-set).]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:07:44 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (2 1/2 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/f/foxandthehound.q.shtml
SUMMARY: The movie's greatest faults lie in its utterly forgettable supporting-character antics, as well as an approach to animation so flat and cheap that one scene even includes a waterfall that doesn't move. In other aspects, however, The Fox and the Hound at least partially earns its reputation. Although some may grumble that the suggestive, race-themed polemic — if only we weren't raised to hate each other so — is contextually odd, both Tod and Cooper make appealing characters, and the tear in the relationship is moving even when it creaks under the weight of inevitability.

Disney's doldrums during the 1970s and 1980s yielded only a handful of animated feature films with any claim on the studio's canon of classics. Even the best of this weak crop, however, were minor works, despite the generous nostalgic affection afforded them by the now-grown generation who absorbed them as kids. The 1981 release The Fox and the Hound was a respectable hit at the time and has endured as one of the most beloved Disney productions of its period — despite its controversially downbeat story, and ample evidence of corner-cutting production values and failures of imagination that define this dark time for the studio. Based on the book by Daniel P. Mannix, The Fox and the Hound tells the tale of a friendship at odds with nature (or is it nurture?), as the two titular animals befriend each other as children only to be raised as mortal enemies. Young fox Tod and baby pup Cooper (voiced by in-demand child actors Keith Coogan and Corey Feldman) happily frolick in their youth, but Cooper's hothead owner Amos suspects that Tod — taken in as an orphan by a neighboring widow — is after his chickens, and the burgeoning friendship is forbidden. The next winter, Cooper is trained to hunt and returns as a strapping predator (voiced by Kurt Russell), while Tod's (voiced by Mickey Rooney) unnatural domestication mitigates his instincts and ill-prepares him for life among the wild. When Cooper's mentor Chief (Pat Buttram) is injured chasing the fox, Cooper discards his lingering sentiment for Tod and swears revenge. While some critics and parents were shocked by the movie's grim climax and bittersweet finale — and the thinly-masked social commentary fits awkwardly on the four shoulders of anthropomorphized animals — the movie's greatest faults lie in its utterly forgettable supporting-character antics, as well as an approach to animation so flat and cheap (following a nice title sequence) that one scene even includes a waterfall that doesn't move. In other aspects, however, The Fox and the Hound at least partially earns its reputation. Although some may grumble that the suggestive, race-themed polemic — if only we weren't raised to hate each other so — is contextually odd, and the relationship between the title characters is developed too quickly, both Tod and Cooper make appealing characters, and the tear in the relationship is moving even when it creaks under the weight of inevitability. Also with voices by Pearl Bailey, Sandy Duncan, and Paul Winchell; directed by Ted Berman, Richard Rich, Art Stevens. Disney presents this 25th Anniversary Edition DVD in a good full-frame transfer (1.33:1, as was the 2000 Gold Classic Collection DVD release; the movie was screened in 1.66:1), with a new Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix. The feature is accompanied by a sneak peek at the upcoming video release The Fox and the Hound 2, the "Forest Friendship" Game, DVD storybook "New Best Friends," sing-along with the song "The Best of Friends," the featurette "Passing the Baton," plus the animated shorts "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" and "Lend a Paw." Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 16 Sep 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (2 1/2 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/f/frailty.q.shtml

The Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 was not only a pivotal moment in American political history, but also a key moment in the course of U.S. journalism. Two unknown Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly investigated the bizarre burglary of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington D.C. and discovered a complex web of corruption and concealment involving the Nixon administration's misuse of reelection funds for financing an aggressive and illegal "dirty tricks" campaign against its opponents. Despite White House efforts to cover-up its egregious abuse of powers, Nixon's administration eventually collapsed in shame, and Woodward and Bernstein emerged as iconic press heroes. In much the same way Star Wars innocently but profoundly affected Hollywood, spawning blockbuster and merchandising mania, Woodward and Bernstein unwittingly inspired — and jaded — a new generation of journalists with romantic visions of scandal-fed stardom and giant-killing media activism, and ushered in a new era of dubiously dependable anonymous sourcing.

Robert Redford, however, took an early interest in the Post's Watergate reporting and began contacting Woodward about a film adaptation of the duo's work while they were still figuring out the puzzle in semi-obscurity. Producer Redford's initiative was crucial to the success of the film All the President's Men, in that it focused the story away from the distractions of politics and polemic and firmly on the "detective story." Directed by Alan J. Pakula and written by William Goldman from Woodward and Bernstein's book, All the President's Men stars Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein as they "follow the money" from the suspiciously connected Watergate burglars to top White House officials. On the way they encounter false starts, red herrings, dead ends, fearful sources, powerful resistance, and the constant, ass-tight scrutiny and support of iconoclastic Post editor Ben Bradlee (the fantastic Jason Robards, Jr.).

All the President's Men is tight and vivid and never wastes time or energy on the dull moralizing that characterizes most movies with political subjects. Redford and Hoffman are perfect as the straight-laced, fact-hungry Woodward and the impulsive, passionate Bernstein, who work their conflicting approaches into an effective tag team. The film is full of scintillating details, including questionable reporting practices (such as digging into library records, hectoring and lying to frightened sources, and combating frustrating "non-denial denials" with equally questionable non-confirmation confirmations), the swaggering stupidity of corruption, the exhaustive research behind the big story, and the unavoidably incestuous relationship between politicians and journalists in D.C. social circles.

Goldman's script has oft been cited as peerless in terms of its structure and a thrill for political junkies, but the esoteric concepts at stake don't really resonate. As Bradlee puts it, "Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country," but that never amounts to more than opinion journalism, and it doesn't really get the heart pounding the way conventional murder and mayhem do. Although paranoia abounds, and the reporters are told more than once to fear for their lives, the Nixon cover-up is ultimately more bureaucratic than sinister, with reputations taking the biggest hit, making All The President's Men more like a top-notch Encyclopedia Brown mystery than a true nail-biter. With the mystery so neutered, the film's most serious flaw is its ending, which never offers resolution for the characters, whose all-consuming work eventually triggers an historic avalanche, and it might have been satisfying to see it happen.

Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Stephen Collins, Hal Holbrook, Jane Alexander, Meredith Baxter, Ned Beatty, Lindsay Crouse, and Robert Walden all appear in small, selfless, and excellent supporting roles.

Warner Home Video'sAll The President's Men: Special Edition is presented in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) that is an improvement over this film's initial DVD release. Both the color and contrast are more sharply defined, and the film's original aspect ratio is more faithfully represented. The visual improvements are especially welcome during the movie's many dark scenes, finally doing justice to Gordon "Prince of Darkness" Willis's evocative cinematography.

• "Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of All the President's Men" (28 min.) focuses mostly on the making of the film and features interviews with Redford, Hoffman, Woodward, Bernstein, and more.
• "Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire" (17 min.) takes a closer look at the Watergate story's impact on journalism. Woodward and Bernstein are lauded, but contemporary press is excoriated for forgetting their legacy and not challenging the powerful with enough vigor. In this regard, it would've been nice to have a more varied cast of interviewees. Only very briefly is Watergate credited with fueling the self-important scandal-mongering that plagues the current 24-hour/blog-based news culture. Includes interviews with Bill Bradlee, Walter Cronkite, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, level-headed journalism expert Oliver Stone, and Linda Ellerbee among others.
• "Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat" (16 min.) addresses the 2005 revelation that Woodward's well-concealed source, "Deep Throat," was FBI assistant director Mark Felt, and his motives are examined.

Also included on Disc Two are the 1975 featurette "Pressure and the Press: The Making of All the President's Men" (10 min.) and a 1976 Jason Robards interview by Dinah Shore in which Dinah insists she knows the identity of "Deep Throat," but never tells (7 min.).

Largely considered the most influential — and, often, the greatest — film director yet to emerge from the Asian continent, Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa earned his plaudits over 50 years of work. Punctuated by the regular appearance of landmark works like Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, amongst others, Kurosawa's career was founded on his skillful and often gripping fusion of Eastern and Western subjects and styles.

For his last masterpiece, 1985's epic Ran, septuagenarian Kurosawa went once more to the well of Western literature for his inspiration, picking source material that would not only deserve the massive scope of the director's vision, but that might also intimately appeal to an aging figurehead acutely experiencing the wane of his powers and faculties: William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear.

Tatsuya Nakadai stars as Hidetora, Great Lord of the Ichimonji clan, a ruthless warrior who imperiously ruled his lands through battle for 50 years. Now in his 70s and visibly tiring, Hidetora precipitously announces that, while he plans to retain his title and status until his death, he is transferring his rule into the hands of his eldest son, Taro (Akira Terao). Expecting the cooperation of his two younger sons, Jiro and Saburo, in supporting and strengthening Taro's command, Hidetora is outraged when Saburo, the youngest, impertinently derides his father's decision as foolish. Hidetora banishes both Saburo and the soldier (Masayuki Yui) who defends him.

Saburo's warning, however, turns out prophetic, as Hidetora quickly finds himself cast as little more than a pawn and/or nuisance in Taro's assertion of his new power, and worse as Jiro's hawkish advisors spur the second son to subvert his older brother's rule. All the discord (or, rather, Chaos, as the film's title translates), weighs heavy on Hidetora's ailing mind, and the former Great Lord begins to slip into a Alzheimer's-like fog of sorrow and shame.

*          *          *

Ran has its problems. As Kurosawa aged, his films became more didactic, and the earnest emphasizing of rather obvious messages and symbols that would make his next two (and final) films, Dreams and Rhapsody in August, almost unstomachable similarly mars key scenes in Ran. Some may also find the 160-minute running time drawn out beyond necessity, as Kurosawa's painterly approach (literally; he paints his storyboards) often resolves itself in near still-life imagery which, while stunningly gorgeous, demands an almost sedated patience.

Above all, however, Ran is an object of great beauty, both in form and performance. Set against a severe topography of dramatic valleys and windswept verdant hills, and decorated with brightly costumed warriors slipping in and out of the rolling fog, Ran provides its three cinematographers, Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saitô and Masaharu Ueda, with a vivid palette, and what they make of it is nothing short of breathtaking. From panoramic vistas speckled with warriors on the march, to the recurring motif of gathering cloud formations, nearly every frame of Ran is a gallery-worthy work of visual art.

As further evidence of the director's penchant for mixing diverse cultural styles, the acting in Ran affects a surprisingly subtle and effective Noh style, unusually combining exaggerated makeup and gestures within a realistic, natural tone, and the entire cast, including many non-actors with little film experience, seamlessly blends into the greater vision of the movie. Particularly brilliant is Mieko Harada, as the manipulative femme fatale Lady Kaede, whose violent swings of emotion are almost as frightening as the deathly calm that surrounds them.

Ran's showstopping set piece, during which Kurosawa's incredible visuals interact most potently with Tôru Takemitsu's transfixing musical score, is the horrific, hypnotic siege on Hidetora's fortress just after the one-hour mark (chapter "Lord Jiro"), which Kurosawa brazenly depicts sans sound effects for five-and-a-half minutes. It is an inspired choice and virtuous filmmaking, easily amongst the greatest and most memorable battle scenes in all of cinema.

*          *          *

The Criterion Collection's two-disc DVD edition of Ran is the third Region One release of this title, and the most definitive to date. While the 2003 Wellspring Media "Masterworks Edition" featured an improved transfer over Fox Lorber's sub-standard 1998 release, Criterion presents the movie in an all-new, restored anamorphic high-definition digital transfer (1.85:1). While Wellspring's transfer featured more vibrant colors, its source was grainy and speckled with flecks and scratches. Criterion's transfer is slightly less saturated, but the colors appear more natural as a result; furthermore, the images are sharper and more detailed, and nearly every blemish has been miraculously removed.

Disc One of Ran: The Criterion Collection includes the feature with a restored Dolby 2.0 Surround track and new subtitle translation. Also available is a commentary (from the earlier Wellspring release) by the professorial Stephen Prince, author of the book The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (the other Wellspring commentary, by the irreverent and disparaging Peter Grilli, is not revived for this edition). Director Sidney Lumet appreciates Ran in a 12-minute introduction, and four international theatrical trailers fill out the remainder of Disc One.

Disc Two of Ran: The Criterion Collection includes a number of substantial documentaries and featurettes. In the 1985 AK, director Chris Marker spends most 74-minutes presenting lyrical slices-of-life behind-the-scenes of Ran's production, favoring mundane shots of the placid Kurosawa in "action" (his working style appears unusually calm and quiet and accentuates the uneventful reality of filmmaking). Marker, better known for his influential 1963 short "La Jetée," includes narration that veers from prosaic description to pretentious overstatement, and favors shots of Kurosawa's magnificent set-pieces in preparation, capturing some neatly incongruous visuals, like ornately costumed extras looking bored or lone grips running across the frame of an elaborate tableau, and able capturing the excruciating level of detail necessary for such an epic production.

Also included is a 30-minute chapter from Toho Masterworks' Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create. There is also a 35-minute reconstruction of the movie from Kurosawa's vivid, impressionistic painted storyboards (from the series Image: Kurosawa's Continuity), plus a new interview with Nakadai. The collection also includes a 28-page booklet including interviews with Kurosawa and composer Takemitsu, and an essay by film critic Michael Wilmington.

Movies — especially comedies — with criminal protagonists face an elementary hurdle to success: Crime is abhorrent to most audience members. However, Hollywood has developed several tricks to surmount this natural resistance and transform criminal characters into sympathetic, sometimes near-heroic, figures:

1. Excuse the characters' anti-social acts by subjecting them to an extremely unfair social system through which their redemption may only be achieved by breaking the bounds of that system (examples: Robin Hood, John Q)
2. Imbue the criminal characters with admirable traits, such as a codes of honor or guilt, and pit them against other criminals or larger forces of corruption with no such mitigating qualities (The Godfather)
3. Or make them so damned attractive and/or charming or sociologically intriguing that the fun in watching their criminal exploits momentarily trumps any moral qualms raised by their actions (Bonnie and Clyde, Pulp Fiction).

Black filmmaking exploded in the early 1990s, kick-started by precocious indie directors like Spike Lee and John Singleton, and solidified as a considerable market force genre with the leap of energetic and angry hip-hop and gangsta culture into both movie narratives and aesthetics. Charles Burnett, however, was laboring in the relative Siberia of pre-'90s African American independent film while Lee and Singleton were still running around in figurative short pants. With his first feature in 1977, Burnett may have earned some deference due seniority, but it wasn't until after Lee began blazing a path of commercial success that Burnett was able to peek, briefly, out of obscurity, culminating with his acclaimed 1994 drama The Glass Shield. Michael Boatman (who later co-starred in the popular sit-com "Spin City") stars as John Johnson, an idealistic, black rookie cop promoted — with a suggestion of political correctness — to a close-knit California State Trooper unit. Anxious to make a good impression and desperate to excel in law enforcement, Johnson weathers race-tinted hazing from his all-white colleagues and superiors, and is marginalized along with the unit's only female deputy, Deb (Lori Petty). Sensing an opportunity to break into the unit's exclusive inner circle, Johnson offers to lie in a report to support a fellow officer's unlawful arrest, but this seemingly minor slip of integrity soon finds Johnson embroiled in an unraveling web of high-level corruption. The Glass Shield was ideally suited for success, coming out of an American culture still reeling from riots ignited by the acquittal of police videotaped beating Rodney King, and released in the midst of O.J. Simpson's racially-charged, corruption-themed murder trial. And yet, The Glass Shield, while timely and enthusiastically reviewed by sympathetic critics, barely mustered a tap on the movie-going consciousness. Why? Burnett is a mannered director and his awkwardly overheated style, pre-dating the kinetic aesthetics of the 1990s, is too stagey. As a writer, he is even less adept, extracting only a muddled story from an equally muddled polemic (Burnett adapted from an unproduced "true crime" screenplay by John Eddie Johnson and Ned Welsh, skillfully removing all traces of realism), and the static, thinly sketched characters are jumped around like passive pieces in Burnett's rhetorical game of moral checkers. For the most part, The Glass Shield is salvaged only by its decent cast, which, despite the bonkers Petty, is very strong. Boatman is likable, even though his character is dimwitted and feckless, and Ice Cube shows his charisma in the prosaic role of an innocent accused of murder. The ensemble gets even stronger in the less savory characters, with veterans like Michael Ironside, M. Emmett Walsh, and Richard Anderson (a.k.a. Oscar Goldman from "The Six Million Dollar Man") as corruption incarnate. Also involved are the reliable Elliot Gould, Tommy Hicks, Bernie Casey, and Don Harvey. Sadly, The Glass Shield fares even worse 10 years later, following a decade of increasingly sophisticated police and courtroom procedural dramas on television, exposing Burnett's supposedly incendiary, "truth-to-power" plotting as hopelessly naive and frequently verging into ridiculousness. Buena Vista/Miramax presents The Glass Shield in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. This "Collector's Series" edition includes a commentary with Burnett and composer Stephen James Taylor, plus brief interview segments with each. Trailer, keep-case.
]]> Gregory P. Dorr Mon, 18 Nov 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: (3 stars)
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/reviews/g/glengarryglenross.shtml

Despite being the most popular sport in the world, the type of football known in the U.S. as soccer is still patiently waiting for a worthy movie dramatization — the film that captures its essence and becomes an inextricable part of its mythology, as The Natural did for baseball, Hoosiers for basketball, and Tin Cup for golf. In fact, coming up with a list of even satisfyingly mediocre soccer movies is a thankless chore, with the game's most notorious incarnation offered by John Huston's anemic World War II drama Victory, starring Sylvester Stallone and legendary player Pelé (who would also star in one of the worst, as the Mr. Miyagi-figure in 1987's ludicrous The Karate Kid rip-off Hotshot). With the sport's popularity gaining slowly in the United States, and the rock star-like status of its athletes across Europe, each year or so seems to bring at least one more attempt at breaking the sport's dreadful 0-0 draw with the movie industry, but the best so far have been merely amusing British comedies like Fever Pitch and Mean Machine. The 2005 drama Goal tries mighty hard to make an impression where others have failed, and often tries too hard. Kuno Becker stars as Santiago Munez, an illegal Mexican teenager in Los Angeles whose dull workaday life is made meaningful only by his showy dominance in the soccer field for a local amateur team. A down-on-his-luck former professional scout and player vacationing from England (Stephen Dillane) catches a glimpse of the wonderkid at play, and tries to resurrect connections with his old club Newcastle United to arrange a try-out. Without even the most tenuous of invitations, Santiago defies his sour puss father (Tony Plana) and, with some help from grandma (Miriam Colon), scrapes together enough cash for airfare to the UK to follow his dream. Naturally, the world of professional sport is cruel to innocent babes, and Santi encounters every imaginable sports cliché obstacle, and he is just about to pack it in on his dream before, believe it or not, he finally gets his shot at the big time.

Comedian Adam Sandler follows up his critically maligned 1994 classic Billy Madison with this similarly absurd 1996 comedy set in the world of professional golf. Sandler, who also co-wrote the movie with his Billy Madison partner Tim Herlihy, stars as Happy Gilmore, a frustrated hockey reject with a very short temper. After his annual failure to make the team at yet another hockey try-out, his impatient girlfriend cruelly dumps him, and Gilmore's losing streak is compounded when his beloved grandmother (Frances Bay) is kicked out of her house for owing $250,000 in back taxes. Desperate for money, Gilmore fortuitously parlays his fierce slapshot into a 400+ yard golf drive and, despite a miserable short game, barely ekes his way onto the pro golf tour. Gilmore's abrasive style and popular antics catch the eye of a comely tour publicist (Julie Bowen) but do not endear him to mean tournament favorite Shooter McGavin (Chris MacDonald), who does his best to sabotage Gilmore's rising star. Like Billy Madison before it, Happy Gilmore is clumsily built on a stale narrative formula that serves as little more than a rickety skeleton for several layers of silliness, buffoonish Sandler outbursts, and absurd tangents, most of which are refreshingly original and joyfully executed. While Gilmore is more technically sound than its predecessor, it's also slightly less generously populated with gags. Still Happy Gilmore is brimming with zany creativity and ambitious (if not always successful) bits, and Sandler's boyish charm is turned on bright enough throughout to carry the few moments wanting for laughs. MacDonald is an effective villain, and Bowen is a delightful romantic lead, but the best supporting performances come from Carl Weathers as the one-handed golf pro who takes Gilmore under his wing and Ben Stiller as the slave-driving orderly at Gilmore's grandmother's rest home. Kevin Nealon, Joe Flaherty, Richard "Jaws" Kiel, Lee Trevino, and Verne Lundquist also make appearances. And, of course, there's Sandler's famous fistfight with game show host Bob Barker, which will likely overshadow the movie's much richer comic material for decades to come. Universal re-releases Happy Gilmore in a Special Edition, available in a two-pack with a special edition re-release of Billy Madison. The feature is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1), as opposed to the open-matte transfer of the original disc, with DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Supplements include 20 minutes of so-so deleted scenes and a gag reel. Keep-case. 

Barbara Kopple's first movie as a director was this astoundingly evocative, Academy Award-winning 1976 documentary that still holds as the most powerful depiction of labor struggles in the United States. Following a murder scandal in the late 1960s, the United Mine Workers of America underwent a "democratic" reform during which workers from the mines wrestled union leadership away from its corrupt bosses and promised the country's unrepresented miners that they would soon be brought into the fold. The beleaguered coal miners of Harlan County, Kent., began their fight to join the union in 1973 to force better working conditions and compensation from Duke Power, and Kopple lived with the miners throughout their struggle. For over a year, the local miners picketed as Duke brought in scabs to replace them and leveraged its powerful influence with the local government to keep the picketers at bay. As the union-hopefuls persisted in disrupting Duke's coal operations, Duke reacted with implicit threats of violence, and the strikers rallied to match them with equal force, resulting in a tragic murder that sobered the escalating hysteria and finally brought Duke to the table to sign a contract accepting unionized workers. Kopple's intimate relationship with the miners of Harlan County — and especially the inspirational wives, mothers, and daughters who keep the strike going when enthusiasm wanes and end up leading the fight against Duke — allowed her to vividly capture the colorful, indelible characters of the poor, blue-collar community, the textures of their environment (including the haunting folk music with which they document their lives), and the emotions behind their crusade. Kopple is naturally sympathetic to the strikers' desire for healthier working and living conditions, but what makes Harlan County U.S.A. particularly effective as a social document is that her personal attachment to her subjects means that neither is she sanguine about unionization as a panacea for the workers — shortly after joining the UMWA, many miners feel that the union has sold out their interests, and they find themselves once again flailing against a detached, powerful body controlling their fates. It's a powerful film that refuses to reduce the complexities, ironies, and paradoxes of the labor movement into politically simple ideals, and it brings the hidden, perilous world of coal mining to full life with unforgettable people and music. This Criterion Collection edition of Harlan County U.S.A. is presented in a new restored high-definition anamorphic digital transfer (1.78:1) with the original monaural audio. Kopple is joined on a commentary track by editor Nancy Baker, and their comments are nearly as fascinating as the movie, as they discuss how their crew's mere presence on the picket lines affected the nature of the conflict between the strikers and the mines. Also included is the half-hour featurette "The Making of Harlan County, U.S.A.", which features new interviews with crew members and the movie's subjects. A selection of outtakes from the film includes additional footage of singer Nimrod Workman, plus a terrific interview during which one of the miner's wives explains how "red-baiting" opposition to the union has piqued her interest in communism. There's also an interview with singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens, and another with Matewan director John Sayles about Harlan County's influence on his work. Also included is a panel discussion from the 2005 Sundance Festival featuring Kopple and Roger Ebert (15 min.). The disc is accompanied by a booklet with essays by film scholar Paul Arthur and music journalist Jon Weisberger. Trailer, keep-case.

The 2000 stoner comedy Dude, Where's My Car? was so ravenously scorned by the guardians of taste that its reputation for meritless idiocy made its title an instant pop-culture catchphrase denoting the ultimate in vapid incompetence (see Michael Moore's subsequent best-seller Dude, Where's My Country?). While by no means a neo-realist masterpiece —Dude is indeed a spectacle of the moronic — it is also an affable and playful comic adventure with a sneaky cleverness exceeding the limitations of its weed-sotted hero dunces. Not to disappoint the expectations of infamy, however, Dude director Danny Leiner has followed up his inadvertent cultural hallmark with another go at the same subject matter, one that this time truly deserves popular derision but none of the accompanying notoriety: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004). Harold (John Cho) is an uptight investment banker with confidence issues; his roommate Kumar (Kal Penn) is a cocky medical prodigy. One Friday night (one assumes, many Friday nights), Harold and Kumar melt their attendant anxieties with some wicked chronic and seek to sate the resulting munchies with a trip to the famed East Coast fast-food joint White Castle. As their destination proves elusive, our stoned anti-heroes endure a night of New Jersey misadventure, encountering extreme-sports hooligans, a mutant redneck with a swinging wife, the strong arm of law enforcement, and, crossing a line no movie was meant to trespass, diarrheic co-eds. Often, Harold and Kumar strives no higher than explicit raunchiness and familiar slapstick hi-jinks, and excels with neither. Bud enthusiasts may enjoy the film's more surreal moments during the latter half, but the sober viewers will likely find them dull in substance. There are a few bright moments, particularly involving a cameo by Doogie Howser M.D.'s Neil Patrick Harris (playing himself), but, for the most part, HAKGTWC lacks the sparkle of true mischief that distinguishes genre standard-bearers, nor do its principal actors employ any persuasive charm. Whereas Dude's baked buddies were amiable man-tards with no mental capacity for bad intentions, Harold and Kumar are self-obsessed, over-educated, pseudo-intelligent potheads, and far less enjoyable guides for a feature-length movie. Lots of cameos: Fred Willard, Ryan Reynolds, Jamie Kennedy, Eddie Kaye Thomas, David Krumholtz, Ethan Embry. New Line presents HAKGTWC this "Extreme Unrated" edition (although its running time, 88 minutes, is the same as the R-rated theatrical version released separately). The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 Surround audio options. This disc features three commentary tracks: the first with Leiner, Cho and Penn; the second with writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg; the third (billed as an "extreme" commentary) with bit-part player Danny Bouchard, who sounds like pretty much how one would imagine the average fan of this movie. The first two commentaries, bizarrely, discuss the movie as if it seriously addresses racial issues. Also included are several deleted/alternate scenes; "The Back Seat Interview" with Cho, Penn and actor/comedian Bobby Lee; "The Art of the Fart" sound documentary; "Cast & Crew: Drive-Thru Bites"; "A Trip to the Land of Burgers" featurette; "Extreme" outtakes; storyboards; photos; a music video; and trailers. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/h/haunted.q.shtml

Wes Craven has figured at just about every important junction in the evolution of the contemporary American horror film. With his grim 1972 debut, The Last House on the Left, Craven struck right to the core of gritty, "realistic" murder-and-revenge exploitation genre. In the 1980s, Craven fashioned the most durable of the decade's many fantasy-horror franchises with his A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). In the '90s, with horror films out of vogue in favor of teen comedies, Craven re-imagined the slasher genre as pop culture-savvy, self-referential parody in the blockbuster Scream series. While he comes a little late to the current trend of remaking "classic" fright flicks, Craven at least can take some pride in improving on the source material, rather than desecrating it. Craven produced a 2006 remake of his own 1977 cult favorite The Hills Have Eyes and got just about every ingredient correct, starting with an original movie that was far from perfect and prime for improvement.

Craven's original The Hills Have Eyes found raw energy in its tale of a lost middle-class family fighting for their lives against an inbred cannibal clan deep in the nuclear desert of New Mexico. While his basic premise of civilized people resorting to savagery in self-defense was effectively wrought from the low budget production, most of the movie's other qualities suffered: The characters were cartoony, key plot-points incoherent, and the crazed hill people (most notably the goon-faced Michael Berryman, who became a horror icon) were a novel but superficial variation on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's evil clan. To put together an updated version of Hills, Craven avoided the familiar trap of hiring one of thousands of narratively inept music video directors and smartly tapped Frenchman Alexandre Aja, the auteur behind 2003's indie horror cult favorite Haute Tension (which oiled the gears for hits like Wolf Creek and Saw), to direct and co-write with his collaborator Grégory Levasseur. Aja's and Levasseur's script for The Hills Have Eyes is intimately faithful to Craven's original and yet also a careful improvement, stripping away the awkward silliness and fleshing out the stranded and besieged Carter family for more powerful emotional connections. With strong performers like Ted Levine, Kathleen Quinlan, "Lost"'s Emilie de Ravin, Dan Byrd, Vinessa Shaw, and Aaron Stanford, the vacationing Carters are sympathetic before they get attacked by the inhabitants of the desert, which gives the final hour added credibility. However, it also creates a problem when The Hills Have Eyes indulges the current horror trend of extended forays into gratuitous torture, and the nauseating sexualized violence of the first, devastating attack against the Carters' trailer is so extreme and protracted that momentary shock-entertainment value becomes alienatingly palpable degradation. While most of the rest of the movie's graphic gore remains within the realm of edgy thrills, this first major victimization of a very believable family (especially the women) breaches a barrier that sours all that follows. Aja is so consistently clever, and often masterful, throughout the rest of this Hills remake, that this sequence becomes even more troublesome for those who prefer their horror fare free from rationalizations about the social value of dispiritingly ugly depictions of egregious violence. Possibly as result, however, the movie's revenge elements are fused with cathartic adrenaline that rescue it from a few annoying horror clichés. Aja's biggest creative derivation is his recasting of the desert's cannibals from wild-eyed creeps hungry for baby meat to radiated mutant hold-outs from a decades-old nuclear test village. This, in addition to play with political tensions amongst the Carters, adds an effective social context plus a vivid, surreal, and intriguing climactic set-piece, even if the mutants' supposedly sympathetic explication is irrational, non-sequiter B.S. Interestingly, despite this attempt to humanize the hill people, these characters are much less memorable than Craven's original thinly-sketched creatures, even with character actors like Billy Drago and Robert Joy behind the prosthetics. Overall, there is plenty to like about this remake of The Hills Have Eyes, if one can weather the unnecessary cruelty without too much psychic damage.

A History of Violence (2005) is that rare David Cronenberg film that doesn't involve unusual foreign objects being inserted into or withdrawn from or otherwise fused with people's bodies, and, not by accident, it's his highest grossing movie in 20 years (topped only by his excellent 1986 remake of The Fly starring Jeff Goldblum). Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a quiet family man living a simple, near-idyllic life in a small and friendly Indiana town. With two children and a devoted wife (Maria Bello), Tom's problems are ordinary: His truck is broken down, and his introverted teenage son (Ashton Holmes) is a target for bullies. However, those conflicts pale when two marauding sociopaths visit their bloody crime spree on Tom's diner, threatening not only him but his terrified employees. In a flash, Tom skillfully (too skillfully) disarms and kills both intruders. The media hail the private and taciturn Tom as a local hero, and although he resists the attention, he can't prevent this accident of fate from dredging up secrets from his past that threaten to destroy his family until he faces them head-on. Adapted by Josh Olson from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, A History of Violence is run-of-the-mill genre material that doesn't completely shed the shallow cartooniness of its source material (the bullying subplot is particularly phony), and yet the film is transformed into a delicately compelling thriller by Cronenberg's quiet and careful treatment. Fans of Cronenberg may enjoy watching a master of psychological creepiness tackle and redeem ordinary material, and given his spotty record over the last 15 years — with failures like eXistenZ (1999) and M. Butterfly (1993) coinciding with a decrease in output — A History of Violence does mark an improvement in product for the eccentric director, even if it doesn't distinguish itself like his unique early movies. Mortensen is terrific, and Bello plays another in a long line of gutsy and sexy women; the miscasting of William Hurt as a Philadelphia gangster, however, is a mystery better left unexplored (and his resulting Oscar nomination is enough to discredit those awards from any further serious consideration). Also with Ed Harris. New Line presents the film on DVD in a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 Surround audio. Cronenberg chats on a commentary track, and the disc also includes the 60-min. documentary "Acts of Violence," in which the filmmakers gamely try to extrapolate deeper meanings from their relatively uninspired movie. Also included are a deleted scene ("Scene 44") and a brief featurette about that scene, a quick look at the minor differences in gore between the U.S. and international versions of the movie, and a short look at Cronenberg's experience with the title at the Cannes Film Festival. Trailer, keep-case.

For those who don't insist that Ice Princess re-invent the tween-oriented ice skating genre, Tim Fywell's bright and inoffensive contribution to girlish daydreams slips into its erstwhile bubblegum formula just enough glimmers of quality to survive the burden of adult skepticism. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Michelle Trachtenberg stars as Casey Carlyle, a geek-ish high school wallflower with a gift for physics and a passion for figure skating. For her application to Harvard, Casey devises a project applying the laws of physics to a group of competitive skaters from her high school. At first, Casey's analyses help the other girls overcome their bugaboos, but it isn't long before Casey turns her experimentation on herself and discovers her own latent talent on the ice. As far as the narrative goes, there are very few surprises in Ice Princess: As a skater, Casey blossoms from a wallflower into a graceful beauty; her obsession with skating is met with resistance from her strict (and, naturally, single and cash-strapped) mother (Joan Cusack); Casey's fellow skaters (Hayden Panettiere, Kirsten Olson) are under immense pressure from their parents and the competition is cutthroat. While Fywell's direction of Ice Princess may be generic, it is also pleasantly unaggressive and rarely belabors its familiar tropes, instead gliding along its predictable path free from self-consciousness. Writers Meg Cabot and Hadley Davis also include enough original and colorful character detail to leaven the clichés, and some fine casting transforms otherwise undistinguished material. Trachtenberg proves able and charming in a leading role supported by quality veterans like Cusack (who salvages some heart from an otherwise dour feminist scold) and Kim Cattrall (as the, you guessed it, bitchy and demanding skating coach still living down the failures of her own skating career). While Ice Princess lacks the spunk of the previous decade's skatefest The Cutting Edge, it is decent and harmless and nowhere near as insufferable as it could have been. It must be said, however, that the romance between Casey and a pillow-headed Zamboni driver (Trevor Blumas) is as empty and insipid as they come, and is, thankfully, not a prominent subplot. Disney's DVD release of Ice Princess offers a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. This disc includes a commentary with actors Trachtenberg, Panettiere, Blumas and Olson; a nice alternate opening scene; a few negligible deleted scenes; and music videos by Caleigh Peters and Aly & A.J. Keep-case.]]> Gregory P. Dorr Wed, 3 Apr 2002 00:00:00 PST DVD Reviews RATING: 0
Link: http://www.dvdjournal.com/quickreviews/i/ifidiebeforeiwake.q.shtml

The second mainstream movie to tackle the 1991 Persian Gulf War — after David O. Russell's excellent 1999 adventure Three Kings — Jarhead fuses familiar elements from Vietnam standards like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, but focuses on the unique existential angst experienced by soldiers in a hi-tech, impersonal war out-of-sync with the troops trained to fight it on the ground. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Anthony Swofford, a misfit Marine who immediately rues his enlistment, and yet leaps at the opportunity to join an elite scout/sniper platoon. When Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army invades Kuwait, Swofford's platoon is one of the first to deploy to Saudi Arabia, and although the soldiers are pumped up for a fight, the political process moves slowly, leaving the troops to linger in the desert for 200 monotonous days of frustrated anticipation. They endure the indeterminate countdown to war in surreal, futile training exercises, like patrolling vast areas of uninhabited desert, and suffer anxieties over their disconnected loved ones back home. The mental stress of boredom manifests in rowdy intra-platoon rivalries, sexual dysfunction, and emotional breakdowns. When "Swoff's" platoon is finally called into battle, the swift and devastating air campaign pre-empts its utility, leaving them dangling and desperate for action.

Directed by Sam Mendes — who won an Oscar for his filmmaking debut, 1999's American Beauty — and adapted from the real Swofford's memoir by another former Marine (William Broyles Jr., an anti-war activist who was drafted to serve in Vietnam), Jarhead has been accused of indulging in politically motivated anti-Marine perfidy, and there is plenty in the film that strains credibility (for example, the Marines' constant lack of discipline and supervision, and no apparent punishment for some very serious transgressions). Swofford's character is confused and confusing, a reluctant soldier, driven to brink of suicide and worse, but also desperate for the action of war, and the movie never gets a coherent handle on his motivations, causing a mortal wound to his potential to elicit empathy. Although it is rarely addressed explicitly, it is briefly hinted that Swofford comes from a family already struggling with mental disorder, which explains his inconsistencies, but also makes him an unreliable guide for such an emotionally charged narrative. Nevertheless, Gyllenhaal has an open and magnetic presence, and his performance digs the most humanity possible out of his schizophrenic character. Mendes, in his short but acclaimed career, has never shown much passion for complexity, preferring to deal in broad caricatures and condescending melodrama, and while Jarhead is an improvement on Beauty's cartoon pretenses, it still suffers from a reliance on easy stereotypes (abusive Drill Instructors, cretinous grunts, etc.). However, Jarhead also features a few believably committed Marines who find noble purpose in facing the bleak madness of war — even one in which all they do is wait for nothing happen. While the movie dips in momentum late into the second act, it provides a provocative, if questionable, glimpse into the personal issues of the post-modern warrior. Also with fine performances by Peter Sarsgaard and Jamie Foxx, and brief appearances from Chris Cooper and Dennis Haysbert.

*          *          *

This miserable 1985 sequel to the enjoyable hit adventure Romancing the Stone (1984) excels only at failing to mimic even one of its predecessor's many winning qualities. Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas return as romance novelist Joan Wilder and inadvertent adventurer Jack Colton, and The Jewel of the Nile catches up with the couple six months into their dream trip sailing around the world. Unlike in Joan's popular novels, however, a happy ending does not translate into a life of effortless romance: After half-a-year on a boat, Joan wants to return to New York to regain a sense of normality. Jack, on the other hand, after years of rugged traveling, is allergic to the real world and wants to sail on from the Riviera to Greece. With her own love story stagnant and stale, Joan is no longer in touch with her muse and faces frustrating writer's block — until she is approached by Omar (Spiros Focás), a mysterious sheik who has sought her out to write the story of his emergence as a transcendent figure in his troubled (fictional) area of North Africa. Jack takes Joan's excitement at the offer as a personal rejection and lets her go, but he's quickly enlisted — along with tagalong scumbag Ralph (Danny DeVito) — by a tribe of warriors who need his help overthrowing Omar, who has stolen their "jewel" in his quest for power. The first mistake made by The Jewel of the Nile's screenwriting team of Mark Rosenthal & Lawrence Konner is splitting up their charismatic stars for nearly half-an-hour in the first act. Even worse, however, is when Jack and Joan are reunited for a long chase across the Nubian Desert and their relationship is limited to idiotic bickering. Neither character is afforded an appealing moment for nearly an hour into the picture, and even that is rare indeed. The one good scene in Jewel, as Joan and Jack celebrate with a Nubian tribe, is typically misconceived: Rather than sharing a tender moment together, Jack simply leers as Joan shakes her booty alongside topless natives. Almost every plot point is nonsensical, and while the plotting of Romancing the Stone relied too heavily on coincidence, it at least had the spark of romance and mystery to salve the incredulity. All Jewel has is anemic and incomprehensible action scenes, and characters who are more loathsome (and less enjoyable) than the spiteful spouses in The War of the Roses. Also with Avner Eisenberg, the flying Karamazov Brothers, and Holland Taylor. Fox's Special Edition of The Jewel of the Nile is presented in a good anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) with Dolby 2.0 Surround. Director Lewis Teague provides an audio commentary on the movie (inexplicably, he says the film is "the highlight of my career"), while other extras include three deleted scenes and a couple of featurettes. Keep-case in paperboard slipcover.