Scrubs was a show
that I came to a little late, but when I did, I was hooked. The combination of
its surreal silliness, rapid-fire pacing (it wasn’t afraid to drop a joke about
a decade-old Snoop Dogg rap lyric and then move right on) and shrewd, internally
logical and consistent character-based comedy made it a real pleasure. Episodic
arcs were clean, though hardly self-contained; most bits played out over the
course of three or four shows, though if you missed one (pre-Tivo, mind you) it
wasn’t a huge, deal-breaking problem. Also, while other ensembles drew more
acclaim (Will & Grace, for
instance), few worked as well off of one another as the cast of Scrubs.
The irreverent flipside of all these serious, sudsy hospital-set
dramas like ER, the series unfolds in
a state of slightly heightened reality, at the Sacred Heart Emergency Care Facility.
There, young doctor J.D. (Zach Braff) works alongside his ex-girlfriend Elliot
(Sarah Chalke) and best friend and college roommate, surgeon Turk (Donald
Faison), as well as Turk’s nurse wife, Carla (Judy Reyes). There are all sorts
of passing squabbles and intra-relationship hurdles to be negotiated, including
newlywed strife, but they’re bound together as often as not against the genial
penny-pinching of Dr. Kelso (Ken Jenkins) and the outlandish pranks of the nameless
janitor (Neil Flynn).
Scrubs is best
when it centers around J.D.’s never-ending quest for the endorsement and
appreciation of his approval-withholding superior, Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley,
in a role that’s tailor-fit to his idiosyncratic comic timing and persona), or
when giving wide leeway for the regulars to read and react to the peculiar behavior
of the aforementioned janitor, Dr. Cox’s ball-busting wife, Jordan (Christa Miller), or the pervy, uncomfortably
extroverted surgeon known as “The Todd” (Robert Maschio).
The fourth season of the series, though, is probably its
most uneven, though still comparatively top-notch when stacked up against the
bland inoffensiveness of most sitcoms. One problem is that things seem a bit
too maudlin at times. Earlier seasons kept things moving at a whipsmart pace,
cycling through guest star girlfriends and boyfriends like Amy Smart, Heather
Locklear, Heather Graham, Scott Foley, Chrystee Pharris, Elizabeth Banks and
(gulp) Tara Reid for unattached cast members. It worked. Here, though, there’s
less of that — and less narrative focus in general, too. (Guest stars include Matthew
Perry, a funny, early-season bit with Julianna Margulies, Molly Shannon and the
recurring Tom Cavanagh, as J.D.’s big brother.) The joke-writing still scores,
but too many episodes seem to be wan reiterations of previously exhausted
themes. “My Life in Four Cameras,” meanwhile, tries to futz around with the
show’s single-camera format and tweak sitcom convention, imagining a scenario through
different perspectives, but it does so unsuccessfully.
The show, creator Bill Lawrence and the rest of its writers
and performers can certainly be forgiven for a bit of this patchiness, as for a
long time the specter of cancellation hung in the air, and it wasn’t clear that
NBC wanted to bring the show back — at least partially a casualty of it not being
produced in-house, Braff once explained to me in an interview, but instead by Touchstone
Television. The possibility of a slightly shortened fifth season, though — and,
more specifically, the big syndication dollars that would follow — proved too lucrative,
and eventually a compromise was hammered out.
Presented in non-anamorphic full screen, the fourth season transfer
of Scrubs doesn’t quite live up to
the billing of its predecessors, even if the set is attractively packaged in a
yellow cardboard slipcase. There are a few issues with graininess and some
inconsistency throughout — seemingly left over from initial broadcast, as I
remember some of the issues from even back then — though nothing major enough
to completely mar one’s enjoyment. Two audio commentaries (one by Chalke, one
by Braff) are complemented by an array of deleted scenes and a healthy
smattering of genial bonus featurettes. Of the latter, one on ancillary
characters like “the Todd” points up the power of the joke and recurrent small
screen bit player. B+ (Show) B+ (Disc)
Trapped), 2004’s The Pumpkin Karver certainly seems to hew to this definition.
X-Men: The Last Stand cleaned up at the box office, but fanboy whipping post Brett Ratner still drew at least a bit of ire for the gun-for-hire manner in which he brought to a (momentary) conclusion initiating director Bryan Singer’s adaptation of the popular Marvel comic book series. 
Employee of the Month as eye-gougingly bad as it seems? Yes, pretty much.
Beauty and the Beast, The Lion, who finds his life tumbling down around him when he catches his wife in bed with another man. He crosses paths with another actor, Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), who hooks Jake up with a plumb housesitting gig when he has to leave town. Through a telescope (naturally), <b>Jake enjoys its view of a comely neighbor</b>, and follows said woman (Deborah Shelton) around, partially out of his own peeping tom piqued interest and partially to protect her from a second and far creepier man that he spies watching her.</p>
<p><b>Jake then witnesses what he thinks is the woman’s death</b>, and becomes not so much an outright suspect as a “person of interest” to police, in the parlance of the current world. It’s after this that he meets porn star Holly Body (Golden Globe Best Supporting Actress nominee Melanie Griffith), and begins to unravel a labyrinthine tangle of erotic deception and criminal plotting.</p>
<p><b>De Palma has made a career largely on femme fatale flicks, and this is the granddaddy of his canon.</b> Co-written by De Palma with Robert Avrech, the movie makes copious use of dizzyingly overt directorial technique, from Pino Donaggio’s score to a variety of interesting framing choices by cinematographer Stephen Burum. The latter is an odd mix. The wide shots, including a mall-set game of cat-and-mouse staged in Beverly Hills, are intricate and involving, but other scenes, like a police interrogation, break down in extreme close-up. Still, the picture looks great for its age, the L.A. locales are a hoot and the end credits are additionally amusing.</p>
<p>What the movie most has going for it are <b>two solid performances from Wasson and Griffith</b>, in probably her second-best work, <b>and some serious downhill momentum</b>. From the latter’s entrance, at around the 70-minute mark, onward to its conclusion, <i>Body Double</i> gives off the pungent aroma of the perfect late night video (in some ways it’s a shame this movie is on something as shiny and new as a DVD) rental. With half a brain one can guess the coming twists, but there’s a delicious flair to the proceedings that make it worthwhile.</p>
<p><i>Body Double</i> is presented in a regular Amray case, in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with solid English and French 5.1 Dolby digital audio tracks and subtitles additionally available in both of those languages. Its bonus features consist of <b>a quartet of featurettes, all comprised of the same all-new interview material</b> with De Palma, Griffith, Henry, Shelton and Dennis Franz, who in the film-within-the-film plays a director loosely fashioned on De Palma. <b>There are loads of interesting revelations and musings here</b>, from Shelton’s encapsulation of the movie (“the sensuality of <i>Body Heat</i> and the sadness of <i>Scenes From a Marriage</i>“) to Henry’s recounting of the building of his character. While De Palma may stretch the bounds of realistic analysis when he deploys the phrase “Brechtian device,” it is fascinating to hear how its inspiration lies at least partially in his meditation on Alfred Hitchcock’s <i>Vertigo</i>. <i>Body Double</i> is tonally warped and a bit outdated, sure, but it’s also an intriguing blend of artfulness and sleaziness, something largely missing in modern cinema. <b>C+ (Movie) B (Disc)</b></p>
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, and neither did<br />
sci-fi adventure lead (<i>The Core</i>) or brooding cop lead (<i>Suspect Zero</i>).<br />
Thankfully, almost a decade since first bursting onto the screen, <b>Eckhart’s<br />
snake-oil charm and charisma are put to glorious use in writer-director Jason<br />
Reitman’s <i>Thank You For Smoking</i></b>.</p>
<p>A scabrous adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s satirical novel of the same<br />
name, <i>Thank You For Smoking</i> is <b>a movie that keeps you consistently<br />
laughing, and yet by its conclusion crystallizes into a persuasive argument for<br />
personal accountability over escalating governmental attempts to legislate<br />
common sense and individual responsibility</b>. Eckhart stars as the smooth-talking<br />
Nick Naylor, a silver-tongued lobbyist who could sell Tupperware full of<br />
Turkish delight to the Kurds. Naylor works for the Academy of Tobacco Studies <st1:place><st1></st1></st1:place> — a mouthpiece<br />
of conglomerated Big Tobacco — and gets paid to defend cynical manufacturers<br />
against the zealotry of those who would legislate cigarettes out of existence.</p>
<p>He’s a hired gun — a damn good one, too — and has no qualms about what he<br />
does. To the chagrin of his ex-wife, Nick even instructs his young son Joey<br />
(Cameron Bright) in moral flexibility, how in arguments he doesn’t himself have<br />
to be right, but only disprove the opposing position. When questioned about<br />
this for a profile piece by an ambitious <st1:state><st1:place>Washington</st1:place></st1:state><br />
reporter, Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes), <b>Nick deploys the yuppie Nuremburg<br />
defense: “Ninety-nine percent of all good and bad is done to pay the mortgage.”</b><br />
It’s no small wonder, then, that Nick’s only friends are his fellow “merchants<br />
of death” lobbyists, firearms spinner Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner) and<br />
pro-alcohol supplicant Polly Bailey (Maria Bello). </p>
<p>When confronted by the opportunistic Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H.<br />
Macy), who wants to put poison stickers on all cigarette packs, Nick goes on a<br />
PR offensive, hitting the talk shows with a vengeance and enlisting a New Age-y<br />
<st1:place>Hollywood</st1:place> super-agent, Jeff Megall (Rob Lowe), to<br />
arrange a blatant product placement deal in a big-budget science-fiction film.<br />
At the behest of his bosses, he even treks out to the desert to visit Lorne Lutch<br />
(Sam Elliott), the original Marlboro Man, who is now dying of cancer and<br />
presents a compelling potential subpoena subject for Finistirre’s impending<br />
Congressional hearings. Eventually, though — and ironically, too, for a man<br />
whose reputation is built on the spry interchangeability and essential<br />
meaninglessness of language — Nick’s own words come back to bite him, and he<br />
becomes a liability to his employers. A death threat and the increased scrutiny<br />
of Joey may force, if not the full-fledged sprouting of a conscience, then at<br />
least a serious reexamination of career path. </p>
<p>Feature neophyte Reitman, the son of comedy legend Ivan Reitman, has an<br />
estimable list of shorts and advertising credits to his name, but <b><i>Thank You<br />
For Smoking</i> sings with a plucky confidence</b> beyond his years. From its<br />
folk-ditty intro and the whimsical music of Rolfe Kent (<i>Sideways</i>) to its<br />
acerbic banter and pitch-perfect supporting characters (Adam Brody’s chatterbox<br />
agency assistant is a highlight), <b>Reitman succeeds in transferring the novel’s<br />
libertarian point of view wholesale to the movie, while also shrewdly assaying<br />
the larger culture of spin that informs its roots</b>. Only a few loose scenes that<br />
let slip limited production means seem out of step with the bigger picture. </p>
<p>To say that <i>Thank You For Smoking</i>‘s Nick Naylor — a proxy for<br />
preening, capitalistic modernity — represents the role Eckhart was born to play<br />
hopefully doesn’t consign him to a career of future disappointments, but rather<br />
highlight his unique ability to be both slightly seedy and still charming as<br />
all get out — to convey avarice as an enchanting trait. The rest of the film is<br />
likewise cast smartly, with Elliott perfectly embodying his embittered cowboy<br />
role and Robert Duvall serving as the mint julep-sipping “Captain” of Big<br />
Tobacco in a small part. <b>The only weak link is Holmes, who still cannot<br />
convincingly portray an adult character of any measurable substance</b>, let alone<br />
the scheming reporter required of her here. That said, <i>Thank You For Smoking</i> is still as <b>giftedly dry and roundly<br />
hilarious</b> a satire as has been seen in American cinema in the past five years.</p>
<p>DVD extras include two audio commentary tracks, one with Reitman flying solo and another with he, Eckhart and bit player Koechner. Thirteen deleted scenes with optional commentary from Reitman run about 15 minutes in total, and the director and star’s appearance on <i>The Charlie Rose Show</i> is also included. Rounding out the disc are storyboards, an art department gallery, a five-minute featurette examining America’s culture of spin and a separate production featurette clocking in at nine minutes. It’s great to see such robust attention to detail on a smaller picture like this. <b>B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)</b></p>
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