Monthly Archives: September 2007

Valerie on the Stairs

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I know, I know… Valerie
on the Stairs sounds like a Counting Crows song. And yet it’s not. Adapted
from a story by Clive Barker, Valerie on
the Stairs is in fact the latest entry in the bestselling Masters of Horror anthology series, this time with series executive producer Mick Garris (The Stand) back in the saddle himself as
writer-director.

Tyron Leitso (Dinotopia)
stars as Rob Hanisey, an unpublished novelist who moves into Highberger House,
a grungy commune for broke, aspiring writers. This affords him the opportunity to
eat on a regular basis, and Tyron figures it might help keep the demons of
rejection somewhat at bay. On his first night, though, he comes into contact
with Valerie (Clare Grant), a gorgeous but mysterious apparition who lives in
the walls of the building and wanders its halls, under the control of a
frightening beast (Candyman’s Tony
Todd) who owns her soul. Rob believes he’s found his muse and a mystery worth
investigating to boot, but none of the other authors want anything to do with
his story. Are they perchance hiding something as well?

Barker has always had a layered penchant for literary in-references,
darkly ironic shading and sexual deviance (just think back to Hellraiser, with its barely contained
lethal-Goth eroticism bubbling just underneath the surface), and a good bit of
that distinguishing instinct remains intact with Garris’ teleplay translation. Valerie on the Stairs, though, while fairly
skillfully constructed from a technical point-of-view, also suffers from the
unfortunate editorial decision (addressed by Garris in one of the bonus
features) to inject goosing moments of gruesome gore and aural smash-cuts. The result
is, because of a small budget to begin with, the reduction in sum effectiveness
of what could have been a much more tightly contained psychological thriller. No need to try to play on a playing field for which you’re not suited, you know?

Housed in a regular Amaray case in turned stored in a
cardboard slipcover, Valerie on the
Stairs is, like every episode in the series so far, presented in a 1.78:1
anamorphic widescreen transfer, with solid flesh tones, deep and consistent
blacks and only a few mild problems with compression artifacts. Dolby digital
5.1 surround sound and Dolby digital 2.0 stereo tracks anchor the audio
presentations, and the latter, scaled-down mix is by the better offering, with
clearer dialogue and music. Animated menus give way to probably the most interesting
bonus feature — an audio commentary track from Garris in which he talks about
the pleasures of working with Christopher Lloyd and the challenges presented by
casting the series as a whole. Other supplemental materials include two production
featurettes with a nice variety of cast and crew interviews, a brief biography
of Garris, a copy of the movie’s script in PDF format for those who happen to have
a DVD-ROM-equipped computer, and a scrollable photo gallery. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

Wedding Crashers

Film Reviews, Old Made New

With Good Luck Chuck just around the bend, and making such a desperately naked play to position itself as the next Wedding Crashers, I figured it’s time to re-post a slightly redacted version of that film’s original review, originally published in Screen International upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:

Jim Carrey remaining devoted to counterbalancing
comedic broadsides with dramatic forays, Hollywood has been in serious need of
a bankable humor infusion. They can call off the search. It’s Vaughn and Wilson who
headline Wedding Crashers, and the
pair deliver a bada-bing smash. A charismatic and indefatigable romp that
strikes just the right balance between well-sketched rudeness and sweetness,
the movie stands poised to dominate the summer comedy sweepstakes.

The story centers on John Beckwith (Wilson)
and Jeremy Grey (Vaughn), two Washington D.C.
divorce mediators who get their off-time kicks posing as brothers or friends
and hopping from nuptial to nuptial. There, they enjoy the free catering,
alcohol and, naturally, love-hungry single women, sweeping the latter off their
feet and into bed. Things change when the guys crash the marriage ceremony of
the oldest daughter of Secretary of the Treasury William Cleary (Christopher
Walken). John falls hard, fast and sincere for youngest daughter Claire (Rachel
McAdams), leaving Jeremy to cope with the amorous advances of Gloria (Isla Fisher), an unleashed stallion of sexual rapaciousness and serial nuttiness. John’s
would-be relationship with Claire is complicated by several obstacles, not the
least of which is of course his phony identity. There’s also Claire’s preppy
jock boyfriend, Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper).

Writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher devise a number of clever
ways to extend the joke of Wedding
Crashers beyond the mere hit-and-run pleasures their characters derive,
from having John and Jeremy bet on quoted scripture and ceremonial music (Johan
Pachelbel’s Canon in D, Richard Wagner’s Wedding March Processional, etc.) to
having them bound together by a leave-no-crasher-behind credo with all sorts of
other rider attachments that eventually leads to a cameo by fellow Frat Pack
member Ferrell as Chazz, the sort of mystical patriarch of this culture of
uninvited party-hopping. The writers are careful, too, to paint John and Jeremy as
impish advantage-takers who have a perhaps misguided but nonetheless abiding
love of weddings (and thus romance). This may seem on the surface like
bet-hedging, but it actually works better since the duo’s prevarications are
neither outlandish nor over-the-top. There are real characters here, and the
laughs come from the absurd over-commitment to them, as well as some solid joke
writing.

Director David Dobkin does a very good job of blending the
film’s disparate comedic styles, and while Wedding Crashers generally oversells
the smarmy loathsomeness of Sack (making sure to paint him as a philandering
letch so as not to retain any possible vestige of audience sympathy), the
Cleary clan — a nice admixture of Kennedy and Bush lore and speculation — provides a suitably rich backdrop against which John and Jeremy can spin their
wheels. The cast all have a blast and, again, Wilson and Vaughn
deliver fashionably winning performances. But it’s Fisher who achieves breakout
clarity with her portrayal of the borderline bipolar Gloria. In a world of
demure or artificially amusing straightwomen, she’s not afraid to play
gleefully unhinged. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (New Line, R, 113 minutes)

Ethan Hawke: In a State of Flux

Interviews

Ethan Hawke is a guy who, for better of worse, almost always follows his feelings, because his attachment to them is the strongest and truest thing he knows. He follows them with regards to the professional choices he makes, and he follows them in his personal life as well. In recent interviews, he’s talked some about the darker side of those feelings, and been more forthcoming about the stress and insecurity brought about by his wife Uma Thurman’s career eclipsing his, and how this fed frictions and fissures already inherent to the relationship, which ended in divorce in 2004.

Night at the Museum, and who — up until 2001’s Training Day, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and arguably only after that, with Taking Lives and 2005’s remake of Assault on Precinct 13 — never particularly seemed to take a studio job just as a commercial “gimme putt.” But then, Hawke has always seemingly been a restless spirit, full of contradictions. That much can be gleaned by how a high-intellect ambivalence and uncertainty fuel his most memorable screen characters, whether as slacker Troy Dyer in Reality Bites, a panicked police recruit in Training Day or the smitten Jesse, in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

It’s hard to say, then, exactly what feelings the relatively chilly theatrical reception of Hawke’s sophomore directorial effort, The Hottest State, based on his own novel, will elicit in him. It is obviously of him, and thus personal and valued, but to hear Hawke tell it, the film wasn’t something he particularly tackled with wide-eyed preciousness. “It just kind of rolled out. I have to say this project happened incredibly organically,” he says.

“When I was younger, when I first wrote the book, I was really just running with that ‘write what you know’ thing they tell you in writing class,” Hawke continues. “I was using the details of my real life to create authenticity for an emotional subject matter that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about how much we take, how much our parents give us the vocabulary for love and how much we’re guided by that and how much that comes out in our romantic relationships. I kind of wanted to find that intersection, you know — the hottest state, an elevated level of passion, and where the protagonist comes from. That’s what I wanted to write about, so I just kind of stole pieces from my own life and from my friends’ lives and just did it.”

But now, Hawke says, The Hottest State feels like somebody else’s life. It is no longer a reflection of his day-to-day, one that encompasses two kids, a divorce and the itinerant rhythms of an acting career. “What was kind of neat, what I feel proud of about The Hottest State, the novel, is that I wrote it when I was so young that it’s not nostalgic at all,” Hawke explains. “You know normally a lot of stories about youth and romantic first love and stuff — (Ivan) Turgenev’s First Love or even (Anton) Chevkov’s The Seagull, when he writes about the young lovers — it’s done with the eye and maturity of an older person kind of mocking it or laughing at it. I wrote it as if it was really important.” Here Hawke lets out a little laugh. “And then with the movie, I felt like I could do a little combination of both.” For the full feature piece interview, from FilmStew, click here.