Daily Archives: August 8, 2006

The Shaggy Dog

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

The leap from small-screen stardom to silver-screen viability is a tough one, as former Home Improvement star Tim Allen’s movie career amply demonstrates. Built chiefly on the foundation of two franchises — Toy Story and The Santa Clause
— in which he is either not seen at all or seen in heavily
prostheticized form, Allen is one of those guys who paying audiences
seem to be able to take or leave. Many films in which he’s taken a more
decidedly straightforward human form (2001’s Joe Somebody, the following year’s Big Trouble) have flat-out tanked, with Galaxy Quest — in which he anchored an estimable ensemble — being the notable exception. The Shaggy Dog,
then, further extends Allen’s status as distributor Disney’s adult-male
counterpart to Lindsay Lohan — which is not to say a serial partier and
late arriver on set, but the star of remade in-house properties.

Upping the antics and, of course, the CGI, The Shaggy Dog
did decently for Disney at the box office this spring, but, call me
old-fashioned, there’s something more inherently charming about the
low-fi 1959 original, based on Felix Salten’s novel and starring Fred
MacMurray. It helps that in that movie it’s not MacMurray who
actually suffers the self-pawing indignity of the magical
transformation into the titular canine, but instead his son Wilby
(Tommy Kirk). Here, though, Allen is workaholic lawyer (and animal
loather) Dave Douglas, who never quite has enough time for his wife
Rebecca (Kristin Davis), his son Josh (Spencer Breslin) and his
activist teenage daughter Carly (Zena Grey). Things change, though,
when the bite of an immortal Tibetan dog (yes, you read right)
transforms Dave constantly back and forth, and pits him — via a series
of constant misunderstandings and botched explanations of his
predicament — against an evil pharmaceutical company out to extract an
anti-aging serum.

Director Brian Robbins brings a deft, light touch to the staging of
the material and Robert Downey, Jr. has a blast as the unprincipled Dr.
Kozak — watching him here makes you realize what a great strictly kids’
performer he could be — but Cormac and Marianne Wibberley’s (I Spy, National Treasure) script never really gels and comes up with many scenarios beyond the expected. All in all, The Shaggy Dog
is exactly the movie you anticipate it to be, almost to the scene. If
dutifully fulfilled requirements in the name of a moralizing family
narrative still floats your boat, then so be it.

Housed in a regular, white Amray snap case, The Shaggy Dog
comes with a paper insert listing chapter stops, and is presented in
the viewer’s choice of 1.33:1 full screen or 2.40:1 widescreen, the
latter enhanced for 16×9 televisions. A Dolby digital 5.1 surround
sound English language track anchors both releases, along with French
and Spanish subtitles, while the full-screen version also includes
French and Spanish 2.0 audio tracks.

As far as supplemental features, a four-minute collection of deleted
scenes is put forth, along with a brief segment which purports to offer
up translations for dog’s bark. (Without benefit of a canine, I was
unable to put this featurette to the test.) Director Robbins and
producer David Hoberman’s glad-handing audio-commentary track is
available on the widescreen version of the movie, and centers mainly
around general, and genial, production anecdotes. A
two-and-a-half-minute blooper reel — showcasing Allen’s nervousness
with some of the animals and Downey, Jr. cracking up over several lines
— and sneak peeks at other Disney titles round things out. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

White Coats

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Former SCTV
founding member Dave Thomas (no, not the dead Wendy’s founder) drops
multi-hyphenate skills in this hospital-based laffer, previously known
as Intern Academy. While not without its broad moments — the very obvious rip-off, err… template here is Scrubs — the movie works well enough as a comedy of colorful relationships, and should thus provide amusing counterpoint to fans of Grey’s Anatomy, which has, of course, supplanted ER as the dominant surgical soap of the American small screen.

Written and directed by Thomas, White Coats
is set at St. Albert’s Hospital, where a budget crunch has driven away
most of the top talent and forced philandering administrator Dr. Cyrill
Kipp (Dan Aykroyd) to sell off equipment to keep things going. This
leaves Dr. Omar Olson (Thomas) on the front lines with a group of five
interns to grapple with lost patients, bizarre emergency-room cases and
the like. It’s here that the movie spends most of its time and focus,
charting the personal foibles and back stories of its young charges
(the neurotic, the hottie working her way through med school by
stripping, et al) by bouncing them off one another in randy and/or
otherwise charged fashion, all while also still allowing for some
showcase fun from Thomas’ considerable roster of friends, including
Dave Foley, Matt Frewer, Saul Rubinek and Maury Chaykin.

Housed in a regular Amray case, White Coats is presented in
1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 English-language
track. Additionally, the case lists optional English subtitles, but
both English and Spanish subtitles are available, though, in a glitch, the former switches to
Spanish roughly three-fifths of the way through the feature.
Thankfully, no such malfunctions mar Thomas’ delightful
audio-commentary track, in which he discusses the inspiration for the
movie, the difficulties inherent in mounting a homegrown Canadian
production and the film’s Edmonton, Alberta shoot, chiefly on location
in an abandoned hospital. He also winkingly acknowledges the beseeching
insistence of financiers and other producers to include some nudity in White Coats, and how this eventually led to the subversive inspiration for the flesh that the film does ultimately bare.

Other supplemental extras include a nice chunk of behind-the-scenes
footage and a 10-minute gag and gaffe reel, which replicates some
material that runs under the closing credits. There’s also a collection
of trailers for other First Look releases, and 13 minutes of cast
auditions for three of the interns — Viv Leacock, Ingrid Kavelaars and
Christine Chatelain. B- (Movie) B- (Disc)

World Trade Center

Film Reviews

In the storied Hollywood history of career colonics, there’s never quite been as distinctively psychologically premonitory a movie as World Trade Center, or at least not recently. As directed by Oliver Stone, it’s a repudiation of all that the filmmaker has most come to embody over the last two decades — his swaggering anti-authoritarianism, his distended style, his cynical (I won’t bow to the reductive, desultory tag of “conspiracy”) perspectives and overtly masculinized frames; honestly, it feels like a mea culpa filed from the set of Alexander. Lacking angles, lacking controversy, lacking context — surprising for a man who so loves tangled background — World Trade Center is an unerringly conscientious, professional and emotionally engaging film, if also never a particular uniquely enlightening one.

Universal’s United 93 earlier this year. Part of this is due to the latter film being the first major studio project out of the gate, certainly, but is the true measure of healing really an extra four months? (We also have the added distraction of Mel Gibson’s drunken slurs, a benefit only insomuch as the fact that only so much reprimanding entertainment news can be foregrounded in the first 12 minutes of any given regular newscast.) But World Trade Center is also by design a movie of much more comfort, a movie of easy affirmation. It doesn’t confront us with any of the hijackers themselves, or ask us to consider the distressing choices of those Americans aboard a doomed jetliner. It instead delivers a flipside portrait of the unbelievable courage and resolve found in those reacting — purely and instinctively — to correspondingly incredible tragedy.

Reduced to a pair of eyes and covered visage for much of the film, Cage delivers a performance rooted in palpable regret. As they stave off death — jointly trapped but out of sight from one another — John and Will’s mutual urgings and conversations cover a range of topics, but center plaintively around their families. “I married the right one, you know?” says John at one point to a similar affirmation by Will, even though the film doesn’t shy away from showing us the former’s uncommunicative marriage, beset by problems of withdrawal. Using a variety of time-tested, low-fi means (fade-ins and -outs wherein John imagines alternate scenarios), World Trade Center slowly makes us believe what our eyes at first can’t confirm, the weight of these words. It also makes deft use of all sorts of small details — pebbles and dust being literally vacuumed out of the mouths of those pulled from rubble, for instance — to bring home the horror of that living hell.

The character of Dave Karnes, though, is problematic as rendered here, in that he embodies most robustly an emotion — laser-focused vengeance — that predominates the days and weeks after September 11, but not its swirling eye center. Swooping down from… where, exactly?, Karnes is given to steely-eyed glares and sanctimonious statements like, “I don’t know if you all know this, but we’re at war,” and, “We’re gonna need some good men to avenge this,” delivered to himself more than anyone else. Dave is first shown glimpsing the attacks on television. Then he goes to get a haircut (a “jarhead” job, he asks for), consult tersely with his priest and slip back into his old military fatigues before reporting for self-activated duty at ground zero. All of this, including the haircut, may be true (in fact, I almost assume it is), but it rings false in its juxtaposition to the rest of this narrative.

For a movie so baldly emotive — I’m not being flip when I say that World Trade Center is Stone’s most feminine work — overt flag-waving of this nature comes across as goading, perfunctory patriotism. We don’t need someone to remind us that we hate the terrorists — we hate those who take the lives of more than 2,750 innocent civilians, citizens from over 80 different countries — because we certainly do. What makes memories of that day so quickly summon a lump in the throat is the utter disbelief we recall, and the surging sympathies it brings forward. While a quality dramatization in many respects, World Trade Center lacks a bit in that department. (Paramount, PG-13, 123 minutes)