DVD Review: Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Rating: 11
Even viewers with low standards can only be expected to chuckle at the novelty of talking dogs a few times before wondering if there might be better use of their time. Still, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” became a huge hit by stretching a computer trick into a feature-length endurance test. Sure, kids will love it, but kids will also eat marshmallows until forced to stop. In that sense, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” is a dog dish overflowing with marshmallow cream.
Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) is a pampered, pedigreed pooch who lives much better than 99 percent of humans, but when she gets lost in Mexico and is stripped of her Harry Winston collar and the comforts of her mansion, Chloe discovers just how out-of-touch she is with her canine roots. And there’s a wrong-side-of-the-tracks love interest for Chloe (Papi, a mixed-breed Chihuahua voiced by George Lopez), some barely written human characters played by Piper Perabo, Jamie Lee Curtis and Manolo Cardona, some mild peril subbing for an actual plot and a truckload of voice talent ranging from Placido Domingo to Michael Urie of “Ugly Betty.”
But beyond the low-rent music choices (George Thorogood must make a killing with soundtrack licenses) and 10-year-old Taco Bell commercial aesthetic, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” trades in some noxious stereotypes about Mexico. It condescendingly makes nice with the nation toward the end, but what country wants to be half-heartedly enabled by a talking dog movie?
“Inglourious Basterds” Trailer
Inglourious Basterds Trailer from Paul on Vimeo.
Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” finally gets its opening this summer — I think some of us first started hearing about this project a decade ago. From the looks of things, our man from the video store has made one slick piece of bloodlust.
Movie Review: “Must Read After My Death”
Charley and Allis in “Must Read After My Death.”
Rating: 79
Domestic psychodramas set in the mid-20th century pique our curiosity because they expose the ugly truths hidden in that era’s idealism, the darkness behind the white picket fence. But while “Revolutionary Road” and “Mad Men” offer smart, often bleak dramatizations of desperation, neither is as jarringly horrific as Morgan Dews’ documentary, “Must Read After My Death.”
Allis and Charley (Dews never gives away the family name of his grandparents) documented their lives in unusual detail for pre-YouTube era. Because Charley spent four months a year on business in Australia, the couple bought matching Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorders and sent spools of spiels across the water. And that would have been wonderful, if Charley hadn’t been a monster of a husband.
Allis, an educated and worldly woman before she married Charley in 1946, was left in Hartford, Conn. to raise their children: Anne, Chuck, Bruce and Douglas. Charley, who believed in open marriage, fooled around Down Under and told his wife all about it in unsettling detail, even asking his girlfriends to sing into the microphone.
The balance of Charley’s concerns surrounded his family’s bad housekeeping. When he was home, he would drink and scream, and his unloving nature and hateful parenting resulted in psychological trauma for the children. One of them, Bruce, was institutionalized for a year, and Allis and the rest of her family were treated by a Dr. Theodore Lenn, who seemed only to exacerbate their misery.
The audiotapes provide the only narration, and are juxtaposed with often sunny, idealized images of Allis and Charley’s home and family. Dews quilts the audio recordings together with home movies and still photos to create a true-life suburban nightmare.
“Must Read After My Death,” named for a file of transcripts Allis left when she died in 2001, opens in New York theaters but can be seen nationwide starting today here. This documentary offers a strong argument for purchasing a new widescreen monitor — with independent film losing support at theaters, online viewing is its best refuge.
Are you #@(%!! nuts?
The Family Guy meets Christian Bale. Great stuff.
– Chase
Ah, The Cryptic Campaigns of Indie Film
This afternoon, I received a courier package that was obviously too flimsy to be actual media. I opened it, and there was a greeting card with a cupid on the cover image saying “Be Mine: Day (1),” and then same cupid weeping inside with the caption, “Or Not (Day 500).”
On the back: the title “(500) Days of Summer.” This is all I got, along with a URL leading to this:
According to the site, the teaser trailer was based on the trailer for Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (Le Mepris):
Perhaps. This looks like a date movie for Staticblog readers. Look for it in 160 days. That would be summer.
DVD Review: “Sex Drive”
Rating: 61
Raunchy sex comedies are only as good as the spirit in which they are done. When hate is the prevailing sentiment, as it was in the recent Dane Cook disaster “My Best Friend’s Girl,” no amount of “brain bleach” can undo the damage. “Sex Drive” taps into the same nutjob sense of adventure that fueled “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” — a canny mix of lowbrow humor and sly satire makes director Sean Anders’ debut good, nasty fun.
Much as “The Girl Next Door” gleefully ripped its plot from “Risky Business,” “Sex Drive” gets its framework from “The Sure Thing.” Amiable dork Ian (Josh Zuckerman) meets hot dream girl Ms. Tasty (Katrina Bowden of “30 Rock”) online, and his strangely self-assured goofball friend Lance (Internet cult hero Clark Duke) pushes him to meet her in Knoxville, Tenn. Ian’s best friend Felicia (Amanda Crew) goes along for the ride (she’s his true love, of course), so they liberate “The Judge,” the prized 1969 Pontiac GTO owned by Ian’s sadistic brother Rex (Oklahoma’s James Marsden), and set out for the hinterlands.
Marsden is riffing on Bill Paxton’s Chet from “Weird Science,” but with a nice twist at the end, and “Sex Drive” is filled with great stopovers and cameos — Fall Out Boy performs at a drunken Rumspringa bash, and Seth Green is golden as an Amish hipster mechanic who fixes “The Judge.” This is not elite material (the filmmakers and cast make sport of award-season promos in the extras), but “Sex Drive” is as much fun as a movie called “Sex Drive” can be.
Movie Review: “The Pink Panther 2″
Steve Martin and John Cleese in “The Pink Panther 2.”
Rating: 15
Such an abundance of talent showed up for “The Pink Panther 2,” it’s difficult to stomach just how pedestrian and unfunny this second Steve Martin stab at Inspector Clouseau turned out. But when the 2006 remake of the Peter Sellers classic grossed nearly $160 million worldwide with barely two laughs in its running time, why make something good when it clearly doesn’t matter?
In this iteration, the giant diamond known as the Pink Panther, along with several other antiquities, get stolen by an evil mastermind. It’s up to Clouseau and a team of international investigators (led by Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina and Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) to find it, but this trifling plot is just a set-up for the rote slapstick sequences Martin executes with the kind of enthusiasm he might bring to a tax audit.
“The Pink Panther 2” gets off to a terrible start when John Cleese shows up as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, taking over for Kevin Kline. Cleese, of course, is the architect of the finest comedic French accent in film history, but director Harald Zwart does not put the “Holy Grail” of funny accents to use — Cleese plays Dreyfus with his own stately British voice. That’s not just missing an opportunity — Zwart’s cinematic incompetence rises to the level of comedic malpractice.
The list of fine talent being smothered in “Pink Panther 2” is long and depressing: Lily Tomlin, Emily Mortimer, Jean Reno, Garcia, Molina, Cleese and Jeremy Irons all step up to collect checks. And Bachchan, who was such an incandescent presence in “Bride and Prejudice,” is given little to do other than look pretty — the same fate Beyonce Knowles suffered in the previous film.
As for Martin, he shoulders much of the blame for this. Not only does he seem like he just doesn’t care, but he shares a co-writing credit on the screenplay. The man who wrote “L.A. Story,” “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” “Roxanne,” “The Jerk” and “Shopgirl” can do so much better.
Movie Review: “Coraline”
“Coraline”
Rating: 78
Henry Selick’s “Coraline” is wickedly beautiful, the stuff of baroque childhood nightmares that cling in our adult minds years later. Adapted by Selick from Neil Gaiman’s novel, this stop-motion animated film rises to the level Selick achieved in his ’90s classics, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach.”
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a bored pre-teen who moves into a dilapidated mansion with her bitter, overworked parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), two garden writers who have little time for their sarcastic daughter. Stir-crazy and looking for anything to spice up her drab life, Coraline snoops around the house and discovers a small door behind some tattered wallpaper.
What Coraline finds behind that door seems like the answer to all her problems: an Other Mother and Other Father who cook wonderful meals, play piano and cater to her every whim. The only difference is that these better versions of her parents have buttons for eyes, and all Coraline’s neighbors, including a pair of theatrical spinster sisters and a retired circus performer, have turned into peculiar versions of themselves.
But when Coraline thinks she wants to live there, the Other Mother tells her the only way she can stay is if she sews buttons on her eyes. This dream world quickly turns macabre as Coraline discovers that her real parents are imprisoned and she must defeat the Other Mother to save them.
Selick is the standard-bearer for stop-motion animation, which was pioneered by Willis O’Brien (“King Kong”) and Ray Harryhausen (“Jason and the Argonauts”). His creations have a spark of life and artistry that is distinct from their computer-animated Pixar brethren — they move like herky-jerky puppets, not real-life beings. Gaiman’s malevolent children’s story is a perfect fit for Selick’s off-kilter sensibility, and while this is not for small children, adults who never fully grew up will relish every moment inside the Other world of “Coraline.”
DVD Review: “Eagle Eye”
Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan in “Eagle Eye.”
Rating: 43
Shia LaBeouf and director D.J. Caruso have been to this well before: a precocious but underachieving young man gets in over his head when no one around him believes a conspiracy is afoot. But while Caruso’s “Disturbia” was an unusually effective and enjoyable update of “Rear Window,” “Eagle Eye” whips viewers around like bush league Michael Bay.
LaBeouf’s Jerry Shaw is a disappointment to his family, who always expected him to equal the achievements of his twin brother Ethan. Then Ethan dies in a traffic accident and events spiral out of control for Jerry. A large sum of money shows up in his bank account, a stash of weapons lands in his apartment, an FBI agent (Billy Bob Thornton) has Jerry in his sights, and a puppet master communicating via cell phone has Jerry and single mom Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) executing increasingly dangerous missions to save Rachel’s 8-year-old boy.
All this high-concept noise makes “Eagle Eye” preposterous even for a modern thriller, and the slam-bang action sequences are so gratuitous that it starts to feel abusive. And there is a surplus of talent involved (Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis), but hardly anything about the film will stick past the closing credits. With “Eagle Eye,” both Caruso and LaBeouf set their sights too low.
Blago The Film Geek
When most people look at former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, they see corruption made flesh, unchecked power, bloated self-importance and the worst hair on a disgraced elected official since U.S. Rep. Jim Traficant of Ohio went to jail.
But I just see a man who has watched too many movies.
Blagojevich, who conducted at least 20 interviews on various TV programs last week instead of testifying during his impeachment trial, seems to have a spool of pop cultural ephemera at the ready whenever he needs to justify or explain his behavior or contextualize his treatment in the press. He compared himself variously to a Hollywood cowboy on his way to a hanging, various heroes in Frank Capra movies, and any number of great men whose lives have been portrayed in film, including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and a few Biblical heroes.
And when asked who would play him in a movie, Blagojevich took it personally. “I wouldn’t mind playing myself,” he said. “I could probably use the job.”
I know this mentality all too well. I reference movie plotlines and quote scripts several times a day in my seminormal dealings with co-workers. I periodically have entire conversations with my best friend Phil Bacharach (who thanks the heavens every day that he is Gov. Brad Henry’s press secretary and not Blago’s) that consist entirely of lines from “Animal House.”
Just this morning, my editor saw a plastic duck call on my desk and said it reminded him of that scene when Daffy Duck’s bill got blown off in the classic 1953 cartoon “Duck Amuck.”
If Blagojevich weren’t such an allegedly crooked goon, he’d be one of “my people.”
The difference is that most of us know our depth. We take jobs that require us to write about movies, or we become film curators or projectionists. Or we go into the film industry itself, using our knowledge as a foundation to create new art.
But Blagojevich is a film geek who lost control, identifying too readily with the fictional characters on screen. His brazen (but still alleged) attempt to sell President Barack Obama’s old senate seat indicate a film character’s air of invincibility. As a result, he is now looking at plenty of free time to watch movies.
Well, maybe “free” isn’t the right word.
