Monthly Archives: July 2006

The 400 Blows

July 12, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Probably the most famous entry of the French New Wave, 1959’s The 400 Blows
introduced not only a precocious film talent to the world, but also
kick-started, in a simplistic yet emotionally florid style, a whole new
trend in cinema — in the process no doubt fooling a small army of
dirty-minded teens looking for more salacious fare based on the title
and its strange English transliteration. In offering up François
Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical account of a troubled adolescence, the
movie would find welcome global commercial and critical reception.

Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s cinematic stand-in, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows
details a somewhat unsentimental, Dickensian world of aloof parents,
oppressive teachers and stifled opportunity. In both story and image,
Truffaut searches for the poetical in the mundane, be it taking out the
trash, suffering the indignities of a mother (Claire Maurier) and
stepfather (Albert Rémy) too busily wrapped up in their own lives to
engage in much hands-on parenting or even grifting a typewriter or a
bit to eat.

For all the talk about the film’s quotidian grace and beauty, its
paramount perceptiveness lies in the manner in which it captures the
clandestine, swallowed anxiety of youth — of how one doesn’t have to be
abused to be detrimentally effected, just merely neglected. Over the
ensuing two decades, Truffaut (and Léaud) would return to Doinel four
more times, fleshing out both the character and this central thematic
preoccupation.

A re-release of one of its earliest, most popular, out-of-print
titles, Criterion’s single-disc release includes a restored, sterling
high-definition digital transfer of the movie, presented in 2.35:1
widescreen with monaural French audio and optional English subtitles.
Two audio-commentary tracks stud the release, one from cinema professor
Brian Stonehill and the other from Robert Lachenay, a lifelong friend
of Truffaut, production supervisor on the movie and the model for
Antoine’s best friend, René. Stonehill’s speaks nicely to truths one
can more readily sense on the screen, while Lachenay’s subtitled chat, en français, provides all sorts of background — about the scene involving said stolen typewriter, for instance.

Criterion’s deep contacts in Europe, where upon-release academic
discourse was and still is more encouraged than Stateside, often help
provide valuable tertiary extras for its discs, and The 400 Blows
is no exception. Alongside six minutes of rare audition material and
another half dozen minutes of newsreel footage of Léaud at the Cannes
Film Festival for the film’s premiere, there are excerpts from a French
television program, Cinéastes de notre temps, in which Truffaut
discusses his youth, his body of critical writing, the origins of the
character of Doinel and his similarities and divergence from his own
youth. There’s also a seven-minute television interview with the late
director about his thoughts on the film’s reception. A (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Lurking in Suburbia

July 11, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Filmmaker Mitchell Altieri’s festival-christened Lurking in Suburbia
is emblematic of what might be called the Ed Burns school of
independent cinema, named for the sort of angsty,
millennial-approximate young-adult jitters and cud-chewing ennui on
display in the actor-writer-director’s debut Sundance hit, 1995’s The Brothers McMullen,
and virtually every movie for which he’s stepped behind the camera
since then. For some folks, that’s interest-piquing praise, for others
damning dismissal, and for others still neither here nor there.

Our
flustered protagonist herein is Conrad Stevens (Joe Egender, a slightly
more animated and mainstreamed Giovanni Ribisi, though still with the
raccoon eyes), a lackadaisical writer (naturally) who on the eve of his
30th birthday finds himself evaluating his beer-fueled,
commitment-avoiding way of life with increasing antipathy. The movie
charts the events leading up to and beyond a big party. Feeling trapped
in the suburban tract bachelor pad, nicknamed “the Palace,” where he’s
lived with his childhood friends for years, Connie finally comes to the
conclusion that his life has to change, especially after — in a bit
stretching credibility even in a movie of heightened absurdity like
this one — his pal Sean (Samuel Child) tries to hook him up with a girl
who turns out to be the daughter of an old high-school classmate.

Despite its innate and considerable likeability in swatches, part of Lurking in Suburbia’s problem is that the character of Conrad really isn’t
the most steadfast embodiment of irresponsibility, and is thus a phony
proxy for all the navel-gazing talk on display. This wouldn’t matter as
much if the movie were more of an arms-length character study, but
Altieri sets Conrad up as a sort of modern-day Ferris Bueller,
utilizing direct address to try to ply our sympathy. While there are
some interesting characters among Conrad’s pals — gay ex-jock Danny
(Ari Zagaris, coming off as Craig Bierko’s younger brother) is notably
well sketched — and the movie gets many of the details of threadbare
20-something existence right (including the random mismatched furniture
and bare living room walls), it overall feels like a mock-plaintive
exercise in emotional manipulation, with too many bits of fading
adolescent awakening cribbed from Esquire’s infamous “Things Never to Do After 30” essay.

Lurking in Suburbia comes housed in a regular Amray case with
a gold-embossed cardboard slipcover, and is presented in letterboxed
widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions. Its English language 2.0
stereo track more than adequately handles the movie’s relatively sparse
aural demands, though the background ambience in some of the party
sequences seems purposefully, woefully under-dialed. Taking a page from
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, there’s a drunken audio commentary track
included herein, as well as a spread of eight deleted scenes and
several trailers. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Eight Below

July 10, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Snow Dogs 2 anyone? No, actually Eight Below,
the Paul Walker-and-sled-dogs tale inspired by a true story, is nowhere
near as wince-inducing as that piece of kiddie entertainment.

Convoy Busters

July 10, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Fans of brawny, foreign-language policeman actioners in the Dirty Harry mold will likely spark to the 1978 Italian import Convoy Busters, the adrenalized tale of an ungovernable cop and the bloody swath of street justice he cuts under a Tuscan sun*.

Scripted by Gino Capone and Teodoro Agrimi, Convoy Busters centers around hardboiled cop Olmi (Violent Naples’
Maurizio Merli), who’s busted down a rank from the homicide division
after arresting a diamond smuggler with friends in high places. After
joining Rome’s emergency squad, Olmi’s extreme tactics make him a quick
enemy of both the mob and a press corps hungry for salacious stories.
After killing an innocent man whom he mistakes for an assassin, Olmi
finds himself bounced further down the occupational ladder, assigned to
a quiet beat on the Adriatic coast. There, he finds love in the arms of
a beautiful schoolteacher, Anna (Olga Karlatos). Naturally, however, a
peaceful and idyllic, sunset-filled ending isn’t in the cards for Olmi,
and when his newly found happiness is messed with, he crosses paths
with a gang of vicious gun runners.

The film’s director, the recently passed Stelvio Massi — who also
sometimes went by Stefano Catalano — was a hard-core genre devotee;
among the many titles to his credit as both a cinematographer and
director were Blood, Sweat and Fear, Highway Racer, Destruction Force and the Black Cobra films from the late 1980s. Convoy Busters
fits easily and comfortably into this canon as a robust tale of Italian
machismo; it’s the blueprint for everything Lorenzo Lamas ever tried
and about half of what Steven Seagal did as well. Merli is intense and
mustachioed, just the way you want your avenging angel cops, but the
movie also isn’t afraid to offer forth a few quirks.

Convoy Busters comes in a clear Amray case with a dual-sided
color sleeve, and is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen with matching
English and Italian Dolby digital mono audio tracks and, obviously,
optional English subtitles. A 20-page, full-color collectible booklet
offers up The De Falco Solution, an original graphic-novel
short story by Maurizio Rosenzweig and Diego Cajelli set in present-day
Milan but inspired by the ’70s ethos of the subgenre on display in the
feature. There are also, hearteningly, a nice slate of conversational
interviews anchoring the bonus material, including chats with the
namesake son of original star Merli, journalist Eolo Capacci, actor
Enio Girolami and directors Enzo Castellari and Ruggero Deodato, who
cite Convoy Busters as an influence. The movie’s original
theatrical trailer and a scrollable gallery of poster art and still
photographs round out the release. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

* Diane Lane not included.

London

July 8, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Jessica Biel, writer-director Hunter Richards and
cinematographer Jo Willems conspire for 92 minutes to avoid showing us a full-on
frontal shot of her breasts, London feels from frame one like the disjointed monologue of a barstool liberal arts
graduate resigned to the life of drunken soliloquies. Ridiculous hairpieces abound, and Richards describes his inspiration for the film thusly: “I just locked these two
characters in a New York bathroom with a copious amount of drugs and let them
beat each other up mentally for 50 pages.” For the full DVD review, from IGN, click here.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

July 7, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Elizabeth Berkley’s turn in Showgirls,
though that was surely less intentional than a result of Paul
Verhoeven’s satirical puppet-mastery. More than that, though, the
original Pirates of the Caribbean seemed able — in its
devil-may-care differentiation from other summer product — to shrewdly
parcel out just the right amount of humor, supernatural horror,
period-piece adventure, character detail and swashbuckling thrill. Dead Man’s Chest, the first of two massive Pirates of the Caribbean
sequels filmed back-to-back, unfortunately wastes all of this capital
and accrued goodwill. While gorgeously lensed, sporadically rousing and
driven by an undeniable technical virtuosity, the film is bloated
beyond all recognition and has absolutely no flow or consistency —
there’s nary a human heartbeat here in its two-and-a-half-hour-plus
running time.

Picking up from the first movie, the pretzel-twist story finds
erstwhile blacksmith Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and aristocratic
Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) torn apart before they can wed,
punished by the British crown for abetting a criminal’s escape. As Will
sets forth to retrieve from Jack Sparrow a compass that will help
activate pardons for he and Elizabeth, Jack tries to squirm out of a
similarly undesirable fate. Having granted him a captaincy for 13
years, squid-faced villain Davey Jones (an enhanced Bill Nighy, above) figures
Jack owes him his soul, as initially agreed upon, and he’s out to lay
claim to his debt. After a protracted island escape which reintroduces
to one another Will and a washed-up Jack — who has fled the dangers of
the sea and, naturally, been taken as a god by the natives — familiar
gamesmanship and good-natured double-crosses begin.

Jack agrees to give Will his compass if Will boards Davey Jones’
ship, the Flying Dutchman, and retrieves for him a special key. Once
onboard, Will meets his long-lost father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan
Skarsgard), now a member of Davey Jones’ accursed crew. Jack is given a
three-day extension to round up a bunch of souls in exchange for his,
and soon Elizabeth enters the fray as well, in assertive form,
searching for Will. Intertwined in a fashion more than a bit
overcomplicated, all of these story strands eventually dovetail — along
with the legend of Davey Jones’ locked-up heart and a massive,
tentacled undersea beast called the Cracken that apparently does his
bidding — in a maritime showdown.

First, a note about what’s right with Dead Man’s Chest, which
is to say primarily Davey Jones. The computer imagery-effected
character is a Gollum-type achievement — literally, one could merely
watch him for half the movie’s running time, so fascinating is he in
his squishy detail — and Nighy gives him a malevolent pomposity. He’s a
worthy and worthwhile villain in the truest senses of the phrase, and
if the stakes between he and Jack never feel intensely personal it’s
only because of the rest of the movie’s distension.

Speaking of which, Depp gamely goes back to the same well of
theatrically prancing tics, and though he’s not given much concrete
with which to work, the character of Jack Sparrow remains a roguish
charmer because you’re slightly mesmerized by his buoyant
unflappability and dogged determination, even as he continually
undercuts, manipulates and otherwise sells out all those around him.
He’s at his best when he’s outmanned and down and out, which is
something the besieged American Everyman can certainly relate to as
wish fulfillment.

Still, though it seems ridiculous to say given the first film’s $140 million budget, Dead Man’s Chest feels like a meticulously artificial, shuck-and-jive Hollywood recapitulation of The Curse of the Black Pearl.
It’s natural that some of the winds of surprise would be let out of
this sequel’s sails, but what was once fresh feels here co-opted, what
was enjoyable feels thrice-overbaked in its elaborate duplication. In
fact, everything about Dead Man’s Chest feels so
emphatically overproduced — from Hans Zimmer’s ridiculously pounding
score, telling audiences what to think, to digressive supporting
character bits like Naomie Harris’ indecipherable shaman priestess and
the forced reintroduction of spurned love interest Commandant
Norrington (Jack Davenport) — as to induce audience fatigue.

As conceived by writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, Dead Man’s Chest
may be the first half of one massive redux, chopped in two. While
perhaps born of economic necessity, this tack triggers a certain
creative stillbirth. This approach worked in the Lord of the Rings franchise because there was a more or less natural mooring to be found in the source material; it didn’t work for The Matrix
sequels because their mode of production seemed to promote an agenda
wherein huge action set pieces were used as counterbalancing ballast
rather than flowing naturally from the story. The latter is true of Dead Man’s Chest too.

The pressures of crafting a sequel double-dip yields to wild overcompensation. Oh, sure, everything looks great, courtesy of production design that spares no expense. But Dead Man’s Chest is an empty vessel — colorful and well stocked, but too long and unfocused to truly thrill, at any price. (Touchstone, PG-13, 150 mins.)

Leroy & Stitch

July 6, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

The second straight-to-video sequel to 2002’s outside-the-box animated Disney hit Lilo & Stitch, Leroy & Stitch
continues the series’ slide into colorful redundancy, offering forth a
healthy smattering of enjoyable character moments, but little of
originality or essentiality beyond that.

As a reward for
rounding up all 625 “experiments,” Lilo, Stitch, Jumba and Pleakley
have been placed around the galaxy in spots where each of them thinks
they truly belong. Chubby Jumba (voiced by David Ogden Stiers) is back
in the laboratory, the excitable Pleakley (voiced by Kevin McDonald) is
teaching college, Lilo is in Hawaii and Stitch (voiced by Chris
Sanders) is commanding a big red battleship. Their lives are all
collectively shook up, however, when the dastardly Dr. Hämsterviel
breaks out of prison and forces Jumba to create a new experiment —
Leroy (also voiced by Sanders), an evil twin of Stitch. Wait — wasn’t
Stitch himself originally an irascible pain in the rump? So that would
make this film a Xeroxed tale of alien versus self, right? Ah, but we
digress…

To make matters even worse, Dr. Hämsterviel soon clones nasty little
Leroy in an effort to form his own standing army. After that, it’s up
to Lilo (this time voiced not by Dakota Fanning, but by Daveigh Chase,
the freaky little girl from The Ring) to gather Stitch and the
rest of the gang from the far-flung corners of outer space to battle
this legion of Leroys. With the chips down and pressure mounting, these
friends discover that the one place they all truly belong is together.

Appreciative parents and young fans who have enjoyed the
Saturday-morning cartoon serial spawned by the original film will still
get a kick out of this flick, but those who were drawn in equal measure
to the original’s hearty emotional investment will find this chiefly an
exercise in elongated character outtakes. The introduction of Leroy
completes the Terminator-esque odyssey of the character of Stitch —
from “bad guy” to less bad guy to full-fledged hero — but Leroy & Stitch doesn’t have quite the scope to make that arc completely stirring.

The film is presented in what is billed as “family-friendly” 1.78:1
widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a Dolby digital 5.1
surround-sound audio track and a bonus, never-previously-broadcast
episode of the aforementioned Lilo & Stitch cartoon series. Straight-to-video animation often gets knocked, and while the matte backgrounds here won’t win Leroy & Stitch
any awards for genre trailblazing, its colors are bright and vivid.
Owing to its streamlined production, the only other supplemental extra
comes in the form of a flight simulator game for kids. Like other
titles of this ilk, however, Leroy & Stitch is also
enhanced/enabled with Disney’s “FastPlay” technology, which means it
operates upon start-up, without the necessary use of a remote — all the
better if your kids have sticky hands. And really, what kids don’t have sticky hands? C (Movie) C (Disc)

A Scanner Darkly

July 6, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Author Philip K. Dick has, especially since his death in 1982,
blossomed in regard, and is now generally acknowledged as the godhead
of modern science fiction, even though the movies adapted from his
works — Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report and Paycheck, among them — often diverge wildly from his texts. For A Scanner Darkly,
however, director Richard Linklater chose to hew closely to the source
material, marrying it to the rotoscope animation technique he helped
pioneer with his 2001 film Waking Life. The result is a thing of unique beauty and free-floating menace, streaked and studded with manic energy and colorful asides.

A Scanner Darkly
centers around an undercover cop who goes by the name of Bob Arctor
(Keanu Reeves), and is set in Anaheim seven years in the future, when
one-fifth of the population is addicted to an illegal drug called
Substance D. While the government wages a military war abroad against
those that manufacture and import the drug, Arctor and hundreds of
thousands of others are paid to spy on their friends and neighbors,
further enabling a culture rampant with paranoia.

Winona Ryder), motor-mouthed dealer Jim Barris (Robert Downey, Jr.),
strung-out surfer Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and bug-eyed tweaker
Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane). Since all, on the surface, are users of
Substance D or other intoxicants, each of these characters are various
degrees of twitchy, deluded and otherwise zonked out. The twist comes
when Arctor — who, like all undercover operatives, wears a “scramble
suit” (more on this later) that renders his identity secret — is asked
to spy on himself. As he tries to walk the narrow mountain pass between
collusion and delusion, Arctor’s grasp on reality and fantasy begins to
fray.

While his films are often powered by a robust geniality — as in, say, Dazed and Confused, School of Rock and Bad News Bears — Linklater also does a great job of persuasively balancing the caustic and the comedic (see Tape, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset), and A Scanner Darkly
certainly continues this trend. By intermingling and subtly linking the
war on drugs with ongoing national security concerns and the war on
terror, Linklater creates a feasible world of only slightly heightened
tonal exaggeration.

A Scanner Darkly will be downgraded or under-regarded by some
simply because of its format, which is a shame. Animation, after all,
is a medium, not a genre. With its thick, hearty outlines — the film is
shot conventionally, and then meticulously drawn over by animators —
and shifting blocks of light and shadow for skin tone, the movie
sometimes seems like topographical human maps come to life, and it’s a
heady, invigorating alternative to younger-skewing animated fare.

The aforementioned “scramble suit,” meanwhile — an opaque jumpsuit
which turns the features of its wearer into an endless morph of
millions of other faces and outfits, like a time-lapse version of
Michael Jackson’s old “Black or White” music video — is utterly
mesmerizing, and emblematic of why this slurry story lends itself so
well to this format. In a live-action telling, CGI could pull off a
convincing enough approximation of this, but never to the degree that
it’s used, wholly of narrative necessity, here.
While A Scanner Darkly is most obviously driven by its visual
audacity, it also has the surreal, loquacious wit and philosophical
tangents characteristic of many of Linklater’s films. The
conspiratorial-surveillance plot at times seems ready to chase itself
into a rabbit hole of its own devising, but late in the game several
key twists pull the story to a new height of allegorical relevance.

A Scanner Darkly
is on one level about personal identity, fraternity and even fidelity,
and the blurry lines and compromised notions of those characteristics,
but it’s also about the transmutation of good into evil and back into
good, and the willful surrender of freedom in the name of
propagandistic safety and betterment. Sounds pretty germane to me. (For an interview with producer Tommy Pallotta, meanwhile, click here.) (Warner Independent, R, 98 mins.)

Charlie’s Angels: The Complete Third Season

July 5, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

I recently caught a snippet of the old Saturday Night Live sketch in which Will Ferrell — in full-on, deadpan unctuous mode as Inside the Actor’s Studio host James Lipton — was mock-interviewing Kate Hudson, expertly portraying Drew Barrymore’s bubbly, wide-eyed mania. In it, he intoned that Charlie’s Angels was, many said, “The greatest television show of all time… created by humans.”

Well, the latter really isn’t in doubt, at least. Watching the junior season of the series, spanning the years of 1978 and ’79, it’s clear that Charlie’s Angels is about as preening and populist a slice of jiggly mass-entertainment as can be. Aliens couldn’t devise something this lightweight in its escapism and yet still so heartily insulated from substantive criticism. Yes, Charlie’s Angels is dumb. Next caveat?

The show, of course, centers around a trio of gorgeous female private detectives — Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd — who solve mysteries with the assistance of loyal aide Bosley (David Doyle) and the guiding hand and helpful financial underwriting of their unseen benefactor boss (voiced by John Forsythe), whom they know only as a disembodied voice over the phone. Original Angel Farrah Fawcett pops up for three episodes to further bump up the heat index in what would also be Jackson’s last year with the show.

So, how does one kick off a third season? Why, in Las Vegas, of course, and with a two-parter in which the girls blend in backstage in an effort to solve a murder. Other episodes include the Angels going undercover as cheerleaders (no guys, that wasn’t only an LSD-induced fantasy), as teachers at an all-girls boarding school and as runners in a marathon. There’s also “Counterfeit Angels,” in which the girls go underground to thwart a devious scam by three women who pose as the Angels in order to rob a sports arena box office. Guest stars herein include Dean Martin, Dick Sargent, Scatman Crothers, Robert Urich, Stephen Collins (long before 7th Heaven) and Jamie Lee Curtis (just before Halloween would put her on the map). Spread out over six discs in three slimline cases in turn housed in a cardboard slipcase, Charlie’s Angels: The Complete Third Season is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with an English language Dolby digital track. Slight grain is steadily present throughout and the colors are sometimes inconsistent, seemingly born of different film stocks. There are also unfortunately no supplemental extras, a tragedy only reinforced by producer Aaron Spelling’s recent demise. Those with a deep and abiding nostalgic yearning for any of the lovely ladies of the cast will adore Charlie’s Angels, but those merely seeking more generalized classic TV kicks can kind better purchase elsewhere. C (Show) D+ (Disc)

Sex is Zero

July 5, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

The title Sex is Zero may conjure up jointly esoteric and allegorical thoughts of writer-director Don Roos’ 1998 indie The Opposite of Sex,
but South Korean filmmaker Je-gyun Yun’s wild and wooly imported comedy
is actually a bawdy college romp much more in the tradition of Porky’s and American Pie.

While
comedy is often thought of as very culturally specific — what’s funny
in one language doesn’t necessarily translate across the ocean — this
movie belies the notion that laughs can’t be universal. From its peppy
opening, set to the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat,” to its catty female
conversations about breast size, stylized production technique,
sex-doll humping and copious gross-out humor, what’s amazing about
2002’s Sex is Zero is how much it feels like an American
adolescent comedy, how spot-on it is tonally. The story centers around
a pathologically shy first-year law student, Eunshik (Chang Jung Lim),
and his crush on the pretty Eunhyo (Ji-won Ha). The movie is chock full
of lively, Seann William Scott-esque supporting turns, however,
including the funny, flip Kyoungiu (Yi Shin) as one of Eunhyo’s
friends, and Songguk (Seong-Guk Choi) as a randy pal of Eunshik’s.

Those that found hearty hilarity in the pie-humping and DNA-tainted beer of the original American Pie will likely be similarly doubled over during Sex is Zero;
its set pieces include the accidental ingestion of a mouse, a
discussion of hand-job injuries, and a sequence in which one character,
out of eggs, decides to fry up a different kind of protein. (Needless
to say, this gets used on toast, and later eaten by a dimwitted
acquaintance who doesn’t believe his friends when they tell him what’s
actually on it.) Of course, there’s also a scene of hazing underneath a
banner that reads, “Spiritual concentration is our nation’s strength,”
so you don’t completely forget that you’re watching a foreign
flick. The cast is attractive and personable, and only the movie’s
late-act dip toward an unintended pregnancy and possible abortion earn
it a few demerits, since these hairpin turns in pitch and atmosphere
tend to feel like a negation of some previously established character
traits.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Sex is Zero is presented in
1.85:1 letterboxed widescreen, with its original Korean language track
and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Wildly gratifying is
distributor Panik House’s superlative treatment of the title, which
includes an English-language audio commentary track with Mike McPadden
and “Mr. Skin” of The Howard Stern Show (“I’m running out of
synonyms for tan nipples …”) and a Spanish-language audio-commentary
track with Jesus “El Pelos” Olvera, the entertainment editor of Al Borde.
An assortment of trailers, production notes, a photo gallery, poster
art, cast biographies and more lend valuably clarifying context to the
movie — which was a smash in its native land — but there are also a
whopping 20 minutes of bloopers and seven minutes of deleted scenes
that are just as fun as portions of the feature proper. The
transliteration of the title may raise some questions, but Sex is Zero richly proves that ribaldry is indeed universal. B (Movie) A- (Disc)

Equinox

July 5, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Following in the stop-motion animation footsteps of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen for 1967’s Equinox,
visual-effects master Dennis Muren and fellow monster maven David
Allen, both under 21 years old at the time, used a slew of preexisting
models that Allen had created as a teenager, including a towering, King
Kong-like ape creature, a tentacled underwater beast which would fit
right in in a kid-theater knock-off of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel and a skeleton right out of Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
The result was a film that inspired fellow monster-magazine readers,
showcasing the rich fruits of possibility of one’s own backyard
creativity.

Still, properly modulated and/or muted expectation is the key prerequisite for Equinox,
as those who don’t appreciate the craft and skill in adolescent
experimentation’s first tentative steps won’t be able to mine much
reward from this movie. Situated in flashback form, the story centers
around a group of four young, sleuthing, amateur archeologists — Jim (WKRP in Cincinnati’s
Frank Bonner), Susan (Barbara Hewitt), David (Skip Shimer) and Vicki
(Robin Snider) — who uncover horror in a dusty state forest. While
questing for a book of spells containing secrets of a strange,
malevolent world which coexists with that of mankind, they find
themselves under attack by winged beasts, huge apes and Satan.

Equinox is simplistic, yes, and its acting quite stilted, but
Muren and his writer and co-director Mark McGee utilize forced
perspective, in-camera editing and other sleights of hand to remarkable
effect for such a low-budget, DIY feature (the movie was shot over the
course of 1965 and ’66 for under $6,500). One interesting thing is that
the movie, originally inclusive of the subtitled moniker A Journey Into the Supernatural, was bought by legendary producer Jack H. Harris (The Blob)
on the strength of its special effects, and then passed off to unsung
filmmaker Jack Woods (who previously had helped edit John Cassavetes’ Faces) to lengthen and restructure.

Trimmed to just Equinox, but beefed up with ADR and other
bits to give the movie much more of a conventional horror bent, the
movie was released in 1970, and saw considerable success both in normal
distribution and as a reel-to-reel sell-thru item. While Allen and
Muren — the latter now a nine-time Oscar winner — have each gone on to
provide special effects for all sorts of beastly blockbusters, from Star Wars and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to The Abyss and Jurassic Park,
their cachet in their field has only enhanced the cult status and
youthful charm of their debut creature-feature collaboration.

Both versions of the movie are presented in 1.33:1 full screen with
Dolby digital mono on Criterion’s new double-disc release, along with
the requisite slate of impressive bonus materials. Famous Monsters of Filmland
editor Forrest J. Ackerman provides a self-indulgent, seven-minute
video introduction, and there are two audio commentaries — one for each
version of the movie. On the 82-minute theatrical cut, Harris and Woods
sit together for a genial and exceedingly detailed chat in which they
pay considerable compliments to cinematographer Mike Hoover and offer
forth all manner of minutiae and trivia. (Ed Begley, Jr. on assistant
camera, ladies and gentlemen!) On the 70-minute original feature, Muren
sits for a solo track of reminiscence (on casting: Hewitt “was the
prettiest girl in my high school,” and thusly qualified) that’s nicely
blended with thoughts from McGee and matte artist/cel animator/effects
technician Jim Danforth regarding the amicable handover of the film to
producer Harris.

On the second disc, Muren sits for a seven-minute interview in which
he details his childhood fascination with effects, and urges young
aspirant filmmakers to reach beyond excuses and work with the tools
that they currently have. Interviews with Bonner, Hewitt and James
Duron are also included, along with deleted scenes and outtakes from
the original 1967 version, archival stop-motion test footage and a
short film featuring the same crew, 1972’s Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell.
Promotional material and a extensive photo gallery of rare stills
nicely complement the trailer and radio spots that touted the movie’s
theatrical release, and a hearty insert booklet with testimonials from
Harryhausen and George Lucas, and an essay from Brock DeShane, richly
point up this title’s sub-set importance. B- (Movie) A- (Disc)

Commander in Chief: Part 1

July 4, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

The success of the small screen’s The West Wing
has helped create, if not an actual and substantial increase in public
interest in the political process, at least more of an appetite for
political entertainment. Ergo, something like ABC’s staid Commander in Chief, which stars Geena Davis as the first female chief executive of the United States.

Davis
is Mackenzie Allen, a political independent who is suddenly elevated
from the vice presidency to the presidency upon the natural death of
her predecessor. Hard-nosed Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton
(Donald Sutherland) tries to box in and/or undercut Allen at every
turn, but loyal chief of staff Jim Gardner (Harry Lennix) helps
effectuate Allen’s populist agenda. Sutherland is fabulous, and guest
star Peter Coyote — as an ex-general and political rival whom Allen
wants to anoint as her vice-presidential nominee — is likewise
excellent, but other casting for the series is weird; as press
secretary Kelly Ludlow, Ever Carradine always seems on the verge of
bursting into tears. Commander in Chief is best when churning
through dialogue and various cloak-and-dagger political scenarios
(“First Choice,” “First… Do No Harm,” “First Scandal”), but later
episodes (“The Mom Who Came to Dinner,” “Sub Enchanted Evening”) come
off as mawkish. The series is also shot in an awfully boxy, staged
fashion, which effectively undercuts any true sense of momentum.

Series creator Rod Lurie previously delved into the Washington
backstabbing and other political maneuvering that accompanied a woman’s
rise to power in the film The Contender, but Commander in Chief definitely cops its moves more from Aaron Sorkin’s aforementioned NBC hit and, I don’t know, 7th Heaven?
There’s a clear-cut attempt made to give parallel balance to the two
narrative rails, the personal and professional, but the show’s family
stuff, with a sad-sack Kyle Secor as the first First Gentleman, Rod
Calloway, comes across, variously, as awkward and inept. Worst is a
scenario in which daughter Rebecca (Caitlin Wachs) loses her diary,
which causes a stir amongst the Secret Service, like there might be
state secrets contained in a teenager’s frustrated rants against a
parent.

I’m not quite sure why a single aborted season of Commander in Chief
is divvied up into two separate volumes on DVD, except perhaps as some
straw-poll ballot initiative to see how much fan support there is out
there for this program, and whether its rumored continuation in the
form of either a series of telepics or serial resuscitation is in fact
economically viable. Regardless, this two-disc set — billed as the
“inaugural edition,” part one — reeks of corporate opportunism, and
while its artificially created, mid-season cliffhanger may drum up some
support for this fall’s release of the rest of the show’s debut season,
it still comes across as crass, hardly the way to legitimately win
hearts and minds.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Commander in Chief is
presented in what is billed as “family-friendly” 1.78:1 widescreen,
enhanced for 16×9 televisions, along with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround
sound audio track. Owing, one supposes, to his eventual ouster as show
runner in favor of television veteran Steven Bocho, there are no audio
commentaries or interviews with series-creator Lurie, and not even a
chat with Davis, which is a real shame. Where’s executive-office
transparency when you most need it? C (Show) C- (Disc)

Gwendoline

July 3, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

Before she became famous for, alternately, wriggling about in Whitesnake music videos and physically assaulting her ex-husband, baseball player Chuck Finley, Tawny Kitaen was indeed an actress, as evidenced not just by her breakout role in Bachelor Party, but also director Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline.

Kitaen did for the French magazine Lui
upon the European release of the movie. Two different trailers — one
for the American cut of the movie, another instrumental-only, much more
artistic version for international audiences — point up the film’s
different selling points (extra nudity also graces the abroad version,
of course). The supplemental knockout, though, is a new sit-down
interview with Jaeckin in which he talks about the movie’s 18-week
shoot, its chariot race sequence and how he was resistant to taking the
project unless he could play up the concept’s humor and bawdy banter.
Extra props, too, to the off-screen interviewer for asking him about
the incident with Finley, and if Kitaen ever displayed any proclivities
toward violence on his set. Jaeckin’s classic answer: “Huh. No. But I
am strong.” B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Tommy Lee Goes to College

July 3, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

At
age 19, aspirant drummer and walking tattoo parlor Tommy Lee helped
form the hard-charging rock ’n’ roll band Mötley Crüe, so who had time
for a liberal-arts education? Now twice-divorced and the father of two
young boys, Lee is trying to put his infamous bad-boy rep behind him,
and one way to do this — since they haven’t yet invented body erasers —
is to go to college, specifically the University of Nebraska.

Comprised of a scant six half-hour episodes originally aired on NBC and VH-1, Tommy Lee Goes to College
can’t really gather the necessary downhill momentum to truly deliver on
the absurdist cachet of its concept. While it faithfully replicates
many touchstone freshman experiences and Lee is a respectful figure,
the sum doesn’t match the whole of the show’s parts. Further saddled by
an officious narration, the series comes across as a cycle of set-piece
vignettes strung together in rib-nudging fashion by an overactive
editor. This means the inclusion of washed-out effects and other
post-production gimmickry — tacks that rather quickly grow tiresome.

Still, it’s undeniable that there’s some fun to be had here. In the
series’ fourth episode, Lee’s English class debates the merit of his
autobiography, which opens with an imagined conversation between Tommy
and his penis. (The reactions of the co-eds are priceless.) Later, he
tries to pledge a fraternity, which births the priceless images of Lee
scrubbing a filthy toilet and trying to negotiate a bundle of laundry,
finally emptying an entire bottle of liquid detergent into the washer.
Pity that we don’t see the consequences of that, though — or much of
anything else. Instead of following this strand through to its logical
conclusion, Lee and another student get a house and try to start their
own frat. Wait… didn’t I see this in a Porky’s movie or something?

Again, the series works best when subverting expectation, and
thrusting the affable Lee back into a corner as the definitive butt of
the show’s joke. It’s savvy that they bestow upon him a smokin’ hot
blonde tutor, senior Natalie Reidmann, but do we really need a slow-mo
introduction complete with windswept hair? Likewise, the very idea of
Lee in chemistry and criminal law classes (he audited a semester, but
did not formally enroll) is rife with its own subtextual hilarity, but
the series indulges only fitfully in its subject’s self-effacing, himbo
confusion, which is actually quite endearing.

Tommy Lee Goes to College is presented in 1.33:1 full screen,
with an English language stereo track. Relatively sparse supplemental
extras represent a further missed opportunity, including a clutch of
self-touting music videos and behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage
(“Tryin’ To Be Me,” “Hello, Again” and the surprisingly soulful “Good
Times”) from Lee’s most recent, commercially underwhelming CD, Tommyland: The Ride. Hard-core fans of Mötley Crüe and other celeb-based entertainment will likely enthusiastically spark to Tommy Lee Goes to College, but for more casual audiences, this remains an elective course. C+ (Show) C- (Disc)

Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party

July 3, 2006Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, InterviewsBrent

The
life of a character actor can be a fairly anonymous one, but there’s
something about Stephen Tobolowsky’s malleable visage — ranging from
plaintive to droll — that earns him an easy place in your memory. Of
course, it doesn’t hurt that he’s been stealing scenes and memorably
serving stories since first parlaying his education in theater at the
University of Illinois into a string of television roles in the
mid-1980s. Movies soon consistently followed, both comedic and dramatic
work, and from Groundhog’s Day (“Phil? It’s Ned… Ned Ryerson!”), Mississippi Burning and Spaceballs to Memento, Sneakers and Single White Female,
among many others, Tobolowsky has become a go-to guy for all sorts of
bit parts officious, unctuous, exasperating and craven. In the
deliciously entertaining Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party, though, he takes center stage as never before.

Mena Suvari’s ex-husband), the movie is a cinema verité
slice-of-life which finds Tobolowsky holding forth in absorbing,
good-naturedly verbose style with all sorts of stories and anecdotes
from his life. It was shot in simple, straightforward fashion to mark
the real-life occasion of its subject’s 54th birthday celebration, but
the idea came much before that, from Tobolowsky’s esteemed status as a
great party guest.

“The genesis was 17 years ago, with Coronas in hand, in my kitchen,”
recalls Tobolowsky, “with me telling stories about being held hostage
at shotgun (one of the movie’s best bits) and other things that had
happened to me, and everyone standing around laughing. Robert
immediately said it would make a great idea for a movie. So it only
took 15 years to do it. I think one of the other people in the kitchen
was a woman who became a producer at NPR, and years later she asked me
to write one of these stories down and perform it live on the radio.
And that forced me to put pen to paper, because the expectation of
performance is much different in a kitchen… than when people are paying
$25 bucks a head on stage to see someone on stage read a story. They
expect professionalism at that rate, and because it was successful on
the radio I had the confidence to think that Robert’s idea might work
on film.”

The movie holds sway because of Tobolowsky’s gift as a beautiful
storyteller, a weaver of colorful detail, but also because the tales
are all so relatable. Well, almost all of them — maybe not the
one about the evening with the stripper spent looking through her high
school yearbook. “Robert wanted lots of Hollywood-type stories,” says
Tobolowsky, who admits he has a few, some of which are included here,
“but the thing that I felt and still maintain is that stories that are
not about film or celebrities or Hollywood figures are ultimately more
exciting, because they have a chance to be more universal and
consequently more powerful. Some of the strongest memories I have are
not necessarily of Hollywood dinner parties, but more of evenings on
front porches where people would tell me stories about their lives, or
talking with the trucker at 3 a.m. Those seem to be the ones that stick
with me.”

Despite the movie’s sometimes frank diversions into adult arenas,
Tobolowsky has had no problems sharing it with his two boys, ages 12
and 17. Surprisingly, he says, they both loved it. “My oldest son
started inviting groups of friends over, I guess because they couldn’t
believe some of the sex and drugs stories,” he says with a laugh. “I
try to be truthful about everything,” he continues. “What I tell them
is that, at my ripe old age now, I don’t know a single soul who wishes they had smoked an extra reefer as opposed to read another book. I haven’t done drugs in years and years and years,
and I regret the amount of time that I wasted doing them, but we all
wish that we had used that time in a more valuable way. That’s what I
tell them.”

Both for those who’ve sparked to Tobolowsky’s rich performances over the years or merely sort of recognize him, his Birthday Party
is a wonderful and funny insight into the man behind the poker-face.
With stories like these, you won’t feel bad about skipping out on your
ex-roommate’s lame party. For more information, visit www.STBPmovie.com.

Married… with Children: The Complete Fifth Season

July 2, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

While
part of the new American way is seemingly the veneration and
celebration of crap-entertainment fads and programs that didn’t make
sense the first time around (I’m calling you out, Furbies!), I’m not
afraid to say it: Married… with Children never really got the respect it deserved.

Developed
as a willfully crude and bawdy counterpoint to television’s happiest,
most functional family, and then-highest-rated family sitcom, The Cosby Show, the proudly and smartly lowbrow Married… with Children lasted for over 11 seasons and 260 episodes, and in the process (along with The Simpsons)
helped shape the in-your-face personality that would give then-upstart
Fox network an important beachhead in its assault on half-hour
conventionality.

Centering around the beleaguered blue-collar Bundy family of Chicago
— shoe salesman Al (Ed O’Neill), garishly coifed stay-at-home-housewife
Peg (Katey Sagal), ditzy daughter Kelly (Christina Applegate) and
sexually frustrated son Bud (David Faustino) — Married… with Children
found laughs in the aggravation and annoyances of everyday life. Its
characters were broadly sketched and weren’t particularly clever or
smart, but they stuck together and suffered life’s disappointments,
hardships and snooty interlopers with an acerbic sense of doomed humor.

The series’ fifth season saw it hit its milestone 100th episode, and
a good handful of episodes are also set around Kelly, all the better to
capitalize upon Applegate’s burgeoning sex appeal. “Al… With Kelly”
finds father taking care of sick daughter; in “Kelly Bounces Back,”
meanwhile, Kelly sets her sights on becoming a car-showroom model, and
in “One Down, Two to Go,” she temporarily moves out and gets an
apartment of her own, much to Peg’s chagrin. Other episodes troll
familiar Murphy’s Law territory (or should that be rechristened
“Bundy’s Law?”), as when Al cancels his auto insurance in “Sue Casa,
His Casa” just before the kids get into a wreck. This season also saw
the savvy introduction of a new husband for uptight, divorced neighbor
Marcy (Amanda Bearse) — the vacuous Jefferson D’Arcy (Ted McGinley) —
in “Married… With Who?” Besides the great comic fodder this new surname
granted the Bundys, and thus by extension the audience, McGinley would
also come to be a valuable member of the ensemble, alternately a
colluder with Al and target of derision in his own right.

Housed in a sturdy cardboard slipcase that stores the gatefold-packaged three-disc set, Married… with Children: The Complete Fifth Season
comes presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with an ample English stereo
audio track that captures the scant aural demands of the show. (Closed
captioning is also available.) There are unfortunately no supplemental
features, save bonus previews, to complement this release, but that’s
probably just the way the Bundys would have liked it. B+ (Show) C- (Disc)

Into the Past with Electric Edwardians

July 2, 2006Blu-ray/DVD ReviewsBrent

DVD
is now chiefly still a commercial medium, powered by the latest
releases, and all their accompanying flash and pizzazz. But just as
Super 8 cameras served as a great equalizer and helped power a
generation of visionary directors almost four decades ago, so too will
the ready availability of deep film history on DVD help inspire and
shape another generation of aspirant filmmakers.

Rich evidence of this can be found in Electric Edwardians,
a new release from Milestone Films which collects many of the so-called
“factory gate films” of pioneering cinematic showmen Sagar Mitchell and
James Kenyon. In the earliest years of the 20th century, these two
enterprising English filmmakers — preeminent among peers — traveled
from town to small town and shot reams of footage of ordinary people
going about their everyday lives. These movies would then be shown
later at nearby fairgrounds, town halls and neighborhood theaters,
sometimes mere hours after their capturing. More often than not,
though, these shorts were advertised in local papers in the days
leading up to an event. The result: hundreds of blue-collar workers,
children, sports fans and seaside vacationers all flocked to see
themselves on the big screen.

Electric Edwardians
collects dozens of these minutes-long mini-films — the filmic
equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb — and presents them, plainly and
plaintively, in all their unvarnished glory, set underneath an
evocative original score by In the Nursery. While this formless
offering of cinema verité isn’t for the more casual film fan, its
unparalleled record of pre-World War I life does prove that the urge to
ogle at and mug for the camera is a timeless one, particularly amongst
children. Whether it’s workers entering Alexandria Docks in Liverpool
or an estimated 20,000 patrons surging through the turnstiles at Lord
Armstrong’s Elswick Works in Newcastle-Upon-Lyne, the sea of chapeaus and earthy, earnest faces provide an intriguing snapshot of lives and an era gone by.

Also included is an illuminating 14-minute-plus interview with Dr.
Vanessa Toulmin, of the University of Sheffield’s National Fairground
Archive, plus a rich optional voiceover commentary in which she
provides further historical context, including details about mobile
printing units and Mitchell and Kenyon’s crammed-frame shooting
technique, part of their self-styled mandate to fit as many faces on
screen as possible. A featurette on the material’s restoration (the
shorts were found in the basement of a building about to be
demolished), a downloadable DVD-ROM press kit and additional,
staged/vaudevillian shorts by the filmmakers (including Diving Lucy) are also included on this lovingly produced disc. For more information, click here to visit Milestone Films’ eponymous site. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Monthly Archives: July 2006

The 400 Blows

Lurking in Suburbia

Eight Below

Convoy Busters

London

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Leroy & Stitch

A Scanner Darkly

Charlie’s Angels: The Complete Third Season

Sex is Zero

Equinox

Commander in Chief: Part 1

Gwendoline

Tommy Lee Goes to College

Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party

Married… with Children: The Complete Fifth Season

Into the Past with Electric Edwardians