Saint Ralph
REVIEWED 04/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

St. Magnus Catholic High School outcast Ralph Walker (first timer Adam Butcher) needs a miracle. Living alone in his deceased Grandparents' musty Hamilton home, facing his war-widowed mother Emma's (Shauna MacDonald; 'Undercover Brother' (2002)) sudden comatose state and the hard eye of strict headmaster Father Fitzpatrick (Gordon Pinsent; 'Blacula' (1972), 'The Shipping News' (2001)), this precocious fourteen year-old's life seems doomed before the autumn of 1953. However, when a notorious bout of unexpected self abuse in the local swimming pool leads Walker to be summarily conscripted into the school's track team towards burning off his young carnal energy under the skeptical care of slightly unorthodox Religion Class teacher Father Hibbert (Campbell Scott; 'The Spanish Prisoner' (1997), 'The Secret Lives of Dentists' (2002)), he quickly sees a glimmer of hope after all. See, despite him confessing to taking the Lord's name in vain 211 times and having 22 impure thoughts in the past week, Ralph wants to be a good boy so that God will give him back his sickly, unconscious mother. Hibbert has taught that miracles can happen every day, and that all you need in order to make them happen are three things: Faith, Purity and Prayer. Not so simple, but he's got to try. Throwing himself into building up his physical endurance, awkwardly interpreting lessons from the Canadian Martyrs book loaned to him by his virtuously coy love interest Claire Collins (Tamara Hope; 'The Deep End' (2001), 'The Republic of Love' (2003)) - as well as the published mystical teachings of famed Canadian long distance runner and 1907 Boston Marathon winner Tom Longboat (1887-1948) - towards winning that twenty-six mile Massachusetts foot race. He hasn't got a chance in Hell, according to Fitzpatrick and pretty well everyone else. But, Walker is determined to make this miracle happen.

Surprisingly good, 'Saint Ralph' isn't a particularly religious movie. It's the type of unassumingly captivating, maturely themed film that even managed to defy uncharacteristically lousy projectionist skills at my local Cineplex during this screening. Legions of chopped heads and boom mic cameos aside, this Period drama from writer/director Michael McGowan ('My Dog Vincent' (1998)) is a consistently entertaining and wonderfully realized small budget fictional effort throughout. Butcher is perfectly cast here, in a completely mesmerizing break through performance rarely ever seen in English language Canadian Cinema and definitely well worth celebrating. His clearly challenging role is huge, yet this young actor single handedly carries the full weight of McGowan's clever script with enormous ability and ease. Awesome. Supporting cast members Pinsent, Scott and Jennifer Tilly (as Nurse Alice) also pull in marvelously underplayed moments of smart dialogue and wry wit here, admirably fleshing out their characters and the delightfully uncomplicated subplots of this successful ninety-eight minuter. You can't help but notice the cinematic magic that unfolds before your eyes, without feeling as though you're sitting through a Sunday School session. I could gush about this one quite a bit, but I'd likely just sound as though I'm merely excited about seeing a very good Canadian-made movie for a change, when it's obviously good by far higher standards repeatedly met in the States and elsewhere. Sure, 'Saint Ralph' does sometimes smack of pretense for the sake of a slight chuckle or a tug at the heartstrings here and there, but it's nothing that overrides a paying audience's enjoyment from beginning to closing credits.

Definitely check out this thoroughly worthwhile flick that's entitled to a lot more notice and praise than will likely be afforded it.

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Sahara
REVIEWED 04/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

There's a certain crazy irony in one of almost fifty American Civil War Confederate Ironclad warships being land locked and lost to the sands of time near a Sun baked ancient riverbed in Africa. Y'know, considering that Centuries-old US conflict erupted when the Southern States seceded from the Union over impending abolition of slavery after President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) was re-elected. However, crazy irony isn't why former Navy Seal turned National Underwater and Marine Agency marine engineer Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey; 'Contact' (1997), 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' (2003)) is obsessed with finding the rusted two hundred and seventeen foot long hull of bygone rebel President Jefferson Davis' (1808-1889) CSS Texas. Pitt is a professional treasure hunter and a born adventure junkie. He also loves an impossible challenge, and the Texas - along with its cramped hold brimming with invaluable gold coins - is the mother lode of all three wrapped up into one, because he's the only guy who believes the shipwreck rests where urban legend, wild rumour and sketchy evidence points half a world away from its Richmond, Virginia berth. Too irresistible. And, closer than he thinks, when Dirk is handed shimmering proof in Morocco that convinces NUMA boss Admiral James Sandecker (William H. Macy) to let him and lifelong sidekick Algiers 'Al' Giordino (Steve Zahn; 'Reality Bites' (1994), 'Daddy Day Care' (2003)) set off up the Nile towards this find of a lifetime. However, there's a catch. Sandecker sends World Health Organization doctor Eva Rojas (Penélope Cruz; 'All the Pretty Horses' (2000), 'Gothika' (2003)) along for the ride, in her bid to investigate a ghoulish epidemic that's quickly ravaging the local tribesmen returning from war torn Mali. It's on Pitt's way, so she's going. Much to the chagrin of Mali's tyrannical warlord General Kazim, who doesn't want anyone snooping around his business partner Yves Massarde's sprawling solar-powered toxic chemical incineration plant that hides a terrible secret deep within its glimmering high tech core...

Based on the real NUMA's founder and renowned American oceanographic conservationist Clive Cussler's 1992 pot boiler - apparently the eleventh from almost two dozen books in his popular Dirk Pitt series - this sporadically pulse pounding actioner feels heavily inspired by equal parts Jacques Cousteau and James Bond all crammed through the same historical inaccuracy machine that recently spawned 'National Treasure'. The CSS Texas was an actual ironclad, reportedly captured by Yankee troops and adopted but never used by the US Navy after the fall of Richmond in 1865. 'Sahara' has it narrowly escaping through impressively heavy Union cannon fire and drifting out to sea. Disappointing artistic license or lazy editing aside, the first five minutes of this flick are absolutely astounding. With it almost clamoring to regain the same exciting level of momentum half a dozen times throughout the course of its hundred and twenty-seven minute screen time with bouts of bare knuckled bravado, ear-splitting explosions of all shapes and sizes, and a small army of bad guys badly aiming their endless haul of ammunition at anything that looks like Matthew McConaughey and Penélope Cruz. I would've just gotten a haircut and had Penélope draw herself a big curly moustache to throw them off of our treasure hunting/epidemic busting trail, but simple logic barely makes it into Thomas Dean Donnelly's aggravatingly familiar, live action cartoon screenplay here. This movie seems to want to be the new 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' (1984), but doesn't have the stamina to keep a paying audience similarly captivated. It wants to be an intriguing mystery tinged with the danger of catastrophic worldwide contamination, but those elements are quickly marginalized in favour of a trite flirt and a few choice quips as more stuff gets blowed up real good. The uneven pacing doesn't allow director Breck Eisner's offering to be a purely Boys with Toys whiplash shoot 'em up, and the drawn out bits of vapidly contrived character development barely make it little more than cinematic bubble gum for the teen dating crowd with other things on their minds in the back row. Frankly, all it has going for it is its trio of main cast members and their natural screen presence. If you like them or (possibly) Cussler's novels, switch off your brain and you'll like this one. If you want to be thoroughly entertained by a rollicking roller coaster ride of non-stop action and suspense, just rewatch the Indiana Jones trilogy again.

Pick up 'Sahara' as a second or third choice rental, but the behind the scenes clips will likely be far more enjoyably lasting than the over-all picture itself.

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Star Wars: Episode III
REVIEWED 05/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Coruscant, the gleaming home world of the Jedi Council and the Galactic Republic's Senate, lays strafed and scarred by its far reaching Civil War against the unified Trade Federation's, Banking Clan's and Commerce Guild's Separatist Droid Army led by General Grievous (voiced by Matthew Wood) and controlled by the treacherous Sith Lord, Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his star pupil Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) barely rescue the Republic's aged Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), kidnapped by Grievous under Dooku, and are given new assignments that test their courage during these tumultuously dangerous times. Obi-Wan is dispatched through hyperspace to hunt down the Separatists at their base camp on the cratered planet of Utapau, and the Council orders Anakin to exploit and report back on whatever transpires from his already close friendship with the politically powerful Chancellor. Jedi Masters Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) and Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) don't trust Palpatine, increasingly wary of his extended rule and extraordinary clout from their united civilizations remaining under Imperial-like Emergency Measures for the sake of maintaining a tenuous security. Suspicions mount that another Sith Lord - Darth Sidious, formidably evil disciple of the Dark Side of the Force - actually controls the Galactic Government at all levels, but there's little proof. However, Skywalker is uneasy about betraying his elderly friend by spying on him, already frustrated by his own unfulfilled aspirations as a skilled Jedi and obsessively confused by fear from sudden night visions that reveal the impending death of his secretly loving pregnant wife, Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman), former Queen and Senator of the war torn planet Naboo. Palpatine - already a longtime father figure to this promising Padawan - senses this and tries to comfort Anakin, but is interrupted when treason erupts that quickly threatens to destroy the Jedi Order. Word then reaches Coruscant that the Separatists have escaped to a volcanic mining world in the outer Mustafar System, soon reuniting this brash young Son of Tatooine and his emotionally torn master in a furious dual that will ultimately send crushing tremors throughout the universe for years to come...

Quite frankly, this third prequel - the sixth and, reportedly, the last installment from this world famous, twenty-eight year-old franchise - that originated from writer/producer/director George Lucas' renowned, Ancient Mythology-based and Japanese film-inspired, six-time Oscar-winning space opera 'Star Wars' (1977), is an incredibly rich visual extravaganza arguably never before seen on the big screen. It truly is an extraordinary achievement from a purely technical standpoint, with regards to lighting and its virtually seamless merging of live action and CGI wizardry. 'Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith' (its full title) is also the darkest offering of the bunch, focusing on the rapid moral decline of Anakin Skywalker's lonely ambition leading to his fate as Darth Vader, while priming you for a return to the first, uh, fourth chapter. However, this PG-13 rated portion of the over-all self-professed allegory written in the mid-Seventies as a response to the Vietnam War and corrupt American politics during the Nixon Administration actually isn't as enjoyable as it could have been for a contemporary paying audience. Sure, seeing the previous installment(s) is pretty well a prerequisite for avoiding migraines while following along, but that's not its weakest point. Neither is having a general idea of how it ends, before the opening scene erupts before your eyes. Just as seen in 'Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace' (1999), 'Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones' (2002), 'Star Wars' (remastered, "fixed" and rereleased in 1997 as 'Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope'), 'Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back' (1980) and 'Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi' (1983), this latest picture fails to fully develop strong primary characters as anything other than two dimensional, live action cartoon stereotypes that clearly rely heavily on whatever natural presence and acting talent the cast brings to the set. For instance, Lucas' dialogue wonderfully underscores Palpatine's manipulative nature, but McDiarmid horribly overacts when left to interpret this role. More importantly, the uneven script hardly allows you to completely witness Skywalker's powerful psychological torment as the thoroughly realized, small scale drama it deserves to be. So, starring lead Christensen's one-note brooding feels annoyingly unconvincing opposite Portman's and McGregor's far more capable supporting performances. Jackson's final scene is the only real highlight. A considerably tighter leash on Roger Barton's whiplash editing also would have helped. Yes, despite the higher level of intense violence, it's still a great flick for older children. 'Sith' seems to be more about the bizarrely grandiose, lasers and sabers a-blazin' action borrowed from such bygone 1930's serials as 'Buck Rogers' and 'Zorro' than the higher-minded themes that it aspires to, that could have made this scattered hundred and forty-minute seguay back to square one a far more memorably enjoyable, intellectually superior final kick for longtime followers who have grown up. You're instead predominantly encouraged to disengage from the neck up and let your eight year-old inner child - along with the real kids sitting next to you - become swept up in the familiar booming soundtrack and be mysteriously intrigued by superficial details that tie in with the other movies in this series. It's not enough anymore.

Visually stunning over-all yet sporadically clever, this last addition to one of the most inspiring Hollywood sagas ever to be absorbed by popular culture is a definite must-see on the big screen for die hard fans and Sci-Fi cinephiles, but you're probably better off simply renting it as a secret guilty pleasure if you actually prefer appropriately lasting substance over a disproportionate wealth of otherwise astounding special effects and digital camera work.

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Steamboy
REVIEWED 05/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Oftentimes astounding creative anachronisms appropriately embellish co-writer/director Katsuhiro Ôtomo's ('Akira' (1988)) hundred and twenty-six minute, 2004 Japanese animated flick set in 1866 against the backdrop of Victorian England. Reportedly begun ten years ago, with production stalled for a couple of years in the late Nineties, 'Steamboy' does feel like a big budget cinematic adaptation of a comic book series along the same lines as the heavily CGI enhanced, live action 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (2003), but with an easily definable flavour of 'Yu-Gi-Oh' (2004) - but, in sooty tweeds and with far less campy magic. More specifically, co-writers Ôtomo's and Sadayuki Murai's screenplay relies more on sporadically relentless, stunning visuals tenuously threaded together by a fairly pedantic plot line rather than on carefully fleshing out these characters for a paying audience to fully tap into.

The world of 'Steamboy' - in which Manchester-based, prepubescent budding inventor James 'Ray' Steam (voiced by Anna Paquin in this English language version) is unwittingly dragged into a war of egos between his altruistic tinkerer Grandfather Lloyd (Patrick Stewart) and his pragmatic yet deluded father Eddie (Alfred Molina) when this young boy comes into the possession of one of three invaluable iron cast orbs containing extremely pressurized vapour - is inarguably an incredibly rich parallel realm of familiar London landmarks overshadowed by wonderfully imaginative unconventional machinery, but it's almost as though the animators hijacked this feature somewhere between making it look like 'Young Sherlock Holmes' (1985) meets a pint-sized telling of 'The Rocketeer' (1991), all clearly inspired by the high velocity flashback cliff hanger scenes from 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' (1989). Its story tends to fall flat, though, with none of the expected wonderment of childhood fantasy tinged with thwarting dastardly schemes and discovering giant contraptions managing to materialize with any tangible sense of fascination or awe. You're never really given reasons to care about these otherwise impressively drawn bygone caricatures that basically act and interact like vacuously trite characters from an episode of Anime television's 'Sailor Moon'. Sadly, making a lot of what eventually explodes across the big screen seem laborious for a paying audience to sit through - even if you purposely switch off your brain and let the fairly self-infatuated images pour over you. There's a lot of potentially great stuff here, but the result in this final cut is that there's nothing much below the eye candy surface to keep you locked in for the long haul. Definitely rent this one if you're in any way a fan of Japanese animation, but 'Steamboy' hardly contains the elaborate depth of 'Akira' or the rip-roaring enthusiasm of the 'Indiana Jones' trilogy to make it a worthwhile piece of entertainment for grown up moviegoers expecting a memorably enjoyable experience. Yawn.

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The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
REVIEWED 06/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Adapted from the first, 2001 novel in New York writer Ann Brashares' young reader series of same-titled books, this sporadically endurable movie has an over-all tendency to heavily rely on formulaic pretense and Hallmark Card clichés throughout. It's a coming of age tearjerker that panders - to the point of insult - more than it provides memorable cinematic substance for its clearly intended fan base of minors. However, the most aggravating aspect of co-screenwriters Delia Ephron's and Elizabeth Chandler's script is that, despite containing a select few wonderfully well-played scenes by Amber Tamblyn ('The Ring' (2002)) and Alexis Bledel ('Sin City' (2005)), this pubescent chick flick feels inherently age inappropriate for the most part. These four Bethesda, Maryland-based sixteen year-old characters; namely, budding documentary film maker and disgruntled Wallman's store clerk Tibby (Tamblyn), Lena (Bledel) the introverted tourist swept up in a feud-tainted romantic Greek fling, wounded Puerto Rican drama queen Carmen (America Ferrera; 'Lords of Dogtown' (2005)) and extroverted blonde jock Bridget (Blake Lively; 'Sandman' (1998)) at soccer camp in Mexico, continually behave and converse on a level of intellectual and emotional sophistication that precocious teenagers probably like to believe they've individually developed on their own before collectively graduating from high school, but the result here is that these actors seem to be portraying older young women filling in for these fictional, sometimes awkwardly blossoming girls who live in a world where the repercussions of underaged sex and the lack of parental guidance aren't too harsh or demanding.

Yes, Tibby's banter with twelve year-old tag along Bailey (Jenna Boyd; 'The Missing' (2003)) is good, but not enough to evade 'Sisterhood's relentless dips into a syrupy quagmire of its own making. Whatever sparks of inspired dialogue this feature does deliver are quickly sabotaged by a pastiche of vacuous quips meant to artificially punctuate each thought in the same way that a television commercial's tag line does. It doesn't ring true, whether you compare it to real life or to this picture's far more gritty and compelling big screen peer, 'Thirteen' (2003). Sure, director Ken Kwapis' ('He Said, She Said' (1991), 'The Beautician and the Beast' (1997)) flip side view of 'The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood' (2002) does cover the familiar, prerequisite themes of teen angst, childhood friendship, first love, uncontrollable crying and hugging, and brazen self-discovery that a paying audience might expect, but really only as a celluloid placebo that avoids becoming too deeply entrenched in the issues that it either skirts or coyly flirts with. Just as girlish summertime fantasy coats a kind of spray-on, magical confidence upon that faded pair of subsequently passed around Levis blue jeans bought at Deja Diva's on the last day before these friends split up for the holidays, 'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' conjures up gobs of unconvincingly trite moments dubiously ascribing to the fairly simpleminded notion that facing the residual effects of death, the loss of innocence or being left abandoned by a failed marriage can all be scrubbed clean by showing up with a new hairdo when the pizza arrives, before the happy ending's closing credits. I'd read that Brashares' original, reader-acclaimed books are considered freshly layered stories involving thoroughly intriguing, recognizably three-dimensional characters. Well, if that's the case and you're a big fan of the novels, you're probably better off returning to the source material rather than sitting through this disappointing nonsense that left me grinding my teeth down to stubby nubs out of exasperation and boredom. Awful.

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The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl
REVIEWED 06/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

In Space, beyond the swirling rings of Saturn, The Darkness casts its thick and black destructive cloud across the Planet Drool. A terrible menace plots to rule this world of precious childhood dreams, already sabotaging its fairgrounds of ferris wheels and looping roller coasters so that the children on them can never fall asleep. The vast and once thriving Sea of Confusion now lays frozen under a solid blanket of glacial death, and power slowly ebbs from the mighty range of volcanoes that skirt the horizon of this doomed land. However, none of it is real. None of Max's (Cayden Boyd) 4th Grade classmates believe any of it exists. Even his mother (Kristin Davis) and father (David Arquette) are highly skeptical. Standing there, on the slightly soupy ground of this distant planet pillaged of light, Max is torn between adopting the cold reality of his peers and parents and accepting that this wondrous landscape borne from his young active imagination is actually solid and tangible and in a lot of trouble. Sharkboy (Taylor Lautner), the mighty amphibian long since separated from his Marine Biologist father and raised by Drool's massive community of sharks, knows the dangers that await them are real. So does Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley), as she tries to help Max remember his own superpowers while their adventure leads them across the Graveyard of Dreams, along the Stream of Consciousness that winds through the Land of Milk and Cookies, towards the towering Ice Castle that keeps the powerful Crystal Heart that can stop the malevolent despot that now controls the looming spire known to all as the Lair of Dreams. Max has written down all of the adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in his small, tattered journal back on Earth, where the school bully Linus (Jacob Davich) has stolen that cherished diary and ruined every page out of spite. That was before Sharkboy and Lavagirl appeared in their Texas classroom one stormy day. Before they whisked Max away on a gleaming silver rocket ship. Before Max realized how seriously his help was needed here. However, these three heroes are also on the run from the devilish Mr. Electric (George Lopez), the fairground's robotic manager now under the spell of this unseen evil that conspires to control Drool, and a pack of merciless plug hounds unleashed to track our trio of freedom fighters quickly threaten to unravel any hope of stopping The Darkness from engulfing everything in its path...

I hadn't consciously expected that my first solo screening of the year would be for this reasonably entertaining kids flick that heavily relies on a somewhat cheesy, fifty year-old marketing novelty. Introduced by the motion picture industry to combat the rising popularity of personal television ownership in the 1950's and then resurrected to lure in moviegoers during the boom of home video rentals in the 1980's, 3-D cinema was initially pioneered by American theatre owner and film producer Sidney W. Pink (1916-2002) for 'Bwana Devil' (1953) - the first in a long line of full-length stereoscopic features that includes the famous 'Creature from the Black Lagoon' (1954), 'The Mask' (1961) - apparently Canada's only actual 3-D horror chiller monster theatre offering, 'Jaws 3' (1983) and the hugely expensive seventeen-minute Disney theme park Sci-Fi 'Captain EO' (1986) starring Michael Jackson, and director Robert Rodriguez's ('Desperado' (1995), 'Sin City' (2005)) award-winning 'Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over' (2003). Pink also reportedly invented the familiar two-colour lensed cardboard glasses that became synonymous with watching these cinematic curiosities, long before subsequent advances in camera and film technology apparently guaranteed that pretty well every IMAX feature has a version shot using this predominantly maligned optical illusion. However, the basic need to wear those paper glasses that pinch the bridge of your nose and change what's playing from looking like badly misregistered colour comics into something similar to a hologram still exists and is briefly, cleverly (Hint: No blue glasses were made*) built into the storyline of Rodriguez's latest, family friendly yet slightly droll offering here. Yes, I liked this ninety-three minute fantasy over-all, despite becoming fairly bored with its relentless amount of chunk-spitting and fingers and things being aimed at the camera to obviously exploit its fairly plot-unimportant three-dee-ness. And yes, I was the lone ticket holder in attendance that afternoon. Cayden Boyd ('Mystic River' (2003), 'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story' (2004)) and Jacob Davich ('The Aviator' (2004)) both do an incredibly capable job in pulling off their somewhat simplistic roles as Max and Linus throughout, with shark finned big screen first timer Taylor Lautner and molten suited, debuting movie actor Taylor Dooley clearly having a blast playing Planet Drool's superheroes. Sure, the dialogue is fairly undemanding and heavily affected by its child stars at times. And, the actual special effects used to create this made up world mainly dictated by corny turn of phrases really aren't particularly impressive or glaringly imaginative beyond the usual Saturday Morning CGI enhanced hybrids that kids see on TV. However, Rodriquez's son Racer's screenplay is wonderfully nutty enough as a kind of low budget, sassier instalment of 'The Never Ending Story' (1984) to hold the attention of the small children this compact and non-preachy morality play is intended for. Stand up comedian George Lopez ('Fatal Instinct' (1993), 'Outta Time' (2002)) is absolutely over the top hilarious as the fiendish Mr. Electric, easily stealing the show with little more than a lot of goofy faces and funny noises, since his entire body is computer generated. Normally, I'd be grinding my molars to dust over that, but it truly works like a charm within the film's context as a playfully fun and safely conflict-driven piece of age appropriate entertainment. Good stuff. Definitely give this somewhat bizarre feature a sit through at the theatre, whether you end up chaperoning a troop of four to six year-olds or just want to enjoy the 3-D experience as a novel summertime matinee.

* Blue framed 3-D glasses now seem available at some theatres...

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Sabah
REVIEWED 07/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

It wasn't her fault. It's just that, seeing that old picture of her as a little girl standing beside her dearly departed father knee deep in the Mediterranean shore awakened something inside her. She missed Syria. Sabah (Arsinée Khanjian) missed her Dad. Still unmarried, she had just turned forty, and she missed having fun like she'd had as a child. Laughing for the sheer pleasure of it. Living life, instead of constantly being cooped up in her mother's Toronto house in subservience to what's expected of her. It's the Muslim way, here in Canada. Her brother Majid (television's 'Eleventh Hour' co-star Jeff Seymour) takes care of their family, her sister Shaheera (Roula Said) raises her Canadian-born teenaged niece Souhaire (Fadia Nadda; 'Black September' (2000)), and Sabah cares for their widowed mother. But, she just wanted to go swimming again. To feel the warm water wash over her as she cut through the cleansing depths, letting that rippling layer above her act like a briefly magical barrier between Sabah in that moment and Sabah's regimented life immersed in obligation and piety awaiting her surfacing. It felt good underwater. Freeing. Now things were complicated. She had lied. She had been sneaky. And, she was fairly certain that she had somehow sinned. That Downtown indoor public swimming pool had become an unexpected meeting place for her. Sabah had met Stephen, a local freelance carpenter with beautiful blue eyes and a smile that melted her secretly girlish heart. She should have simply taken back her towel, curtly thanked him and walked away. Her adult life was supposed to remain simple and Sabah wasn't a child anymore. But, those eyes. She should have thought more clearly. Those rugged hands of his. Her heart wouldn't let her. Stephen's name deliciously tickled her lips as she repeated it alone in her bedroom. It had been months since their first encounter, but Sabah still couldn't bring herself to tell her family about this wonderful and crazy and loving relationship with Stephen. It would destroy them. He's agnostic, which is even worse than if he'd been Christian - which is still a bad thing in the eyes of her community. They'd ostracised Sabah's family if they found out. Her mother and Majid would be furious with her. This has to remain a secret. Despite Stephen's simmering frustrations over them continually sneaking around, it must. She just wants everyone to be happy.

Playing out as a kind of watered down retooling of the far more sumptuously captivating Arabic flick 'Satin Rouge' (2003), this predominantly English-language Canadian offering from Montreal's writer/director Ruba Nadda ('I Always Come to You' (2000), 'Unsettled' (2001)) is a somewhat tritely undemanding yet pleasant enough romantic culture clash tinged with religious bigotry that threatens to stifle forty year-old Muslim Syrian immigrant spinster Sabah's (Arsinée Khanjian; 'The Sweet Hereafter' (1997), 'Ararat' (2002)) demurely clandestine relationship with her White, non-Faith boyfriend Stephen (Shawn Doyle; 'The Long Kiss Goodnight' (1996), 'Don't Say a Word' (2001)). Unfortunately, 'Sabah' is a small movie that relies more on the slightly caricaturistic personalities and foibles of these fairly pedantic characters that seem plucked straight from an After School Special along with its behind the scenes television crew. The production itself offers up nothing much that's particularly inspiring, and cinematographer Luc Montpellier seemed to be on auto pilot for the majority of this eighty-nine minute, agonizingly safe family drama. Like I'd mentioned, it all feels watered down, as though Nadda was afraid to ruffle a few feathers by actually punctuating the primary lead's underlying fears of communal retribution for dating outside of her faith to the eventual chagrin of her immigrant family. It's got no guts, so whatever passion this feature attempts to build towards ends up stumbling from the big screen into a paying audience's consciousness through osmosis. It's frustrating, because the premise obviously has a lot going for it. It certainly worked for Shakespeare. So, if you're going to tackle the issues of racial tension, why then avoid actually tackling them at all? The screenplay could have easily been pushed further with more attention to the expression of internal turmoil and strained relations, possibly with a peripheral sub story citing variations on real world headlines where overzealousness has led to some fairly horrifying consequences. As it stands, 'Sabah' tends to hesitate a lot - as though checking to make sure that nobody's thrown their popcorn at the projectionist or stormed out for their money back - meekly poking fun at Muslim and non-Muslim quirks from a safe distance without worrying too much about truly being funny. It lazily sits back and apparently lets this cast basically do whatever comes to mind: Nosh, shimmy and pose for the shot. It wouldn't be too surprising to learn that much of the dialogue was written during rehearsals, if that had happened, frankly. However, miraculously, there is a bright side here. Khanjian is absolutely wonderful throughout, effortlessly mirroring the same sort of freshly hypnotic bundle of nervously expressed joyful reclamation that made Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn irrepressible Hollywood stars. Every time her smile sneaks through, you catch your breath and can't help but remain transfixed by her truly outstanding performance here, wanting everything to work out for Sabah. Awesome. Fortunately, in spite of itself, this otherwise lacklustre pastiche is saved by this one incredibly versatile actor.

Definitely rent this one for Arsinée Khanjian's truly exquisite work here, but don't get your hopes up that anyone or anything else featured in 'Sabah' is worth watching.

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Sarkar
REVIEWED 07/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

The warm and sunny breeze that swirled through that enclosed balcony suddenly chilled as Rasheed Bhai (Zakir) entered Subhash Nagre's (Amitabh Bachchan) palatial Bombay stronghold. Shankar (Abhishek Bachchan), Nagre's youngest son, was still en route from the States with his lovely associate Pooja (Katrina Kaif) at the time, but the consequences of that strained meeting would touch his life with as much malicious force as if he'd been standing beside his stoic, powerful father in person. Bhai was an underworld killer from Dubai, there to rightfully honour Subhash - known to this corrupt city's elite and peasantry as Sarkar, the Chief, the Lord, the Don - and to respectfully ask permission to import large quantities of illicit cargo for immediate distribution to an eager drug clientele. Sarkar listened as this dangerous man clad in black presented his destructive request. For decades, the elderly Nagre had taken care of the people when all formal channels through the elected government and the police department had smugly failed them. Their problems were his problems, and his problems were dealt with swiftly and efficiently by Sarkar's right hand man Chandra's (Ravi Kale) army of seasoned goons. Much to the chagrin of those in office, Subhash's iron rule over all criminal activity here has continued to secured his place as their unofficial patriarch. Bhai's eyes burned with rage when his offer was denied. This Sarkar was obvious living in the past, blind to the huge profits that drugs would surely bring to his cartel. Nagre's eldest son Vishnu (Kay Kay Menon) seems to be the only one in that family who isn't behind the times, producing movies and making a name for himself by using his power to corrupt and bully everyone in his path. The Nagre's must be pushed aside to make way for the new breed of crime. It seems impossible, until an important political martyr is killed, sparking street riots and panicked accusations, and Bhai and his shadowy boss seize the opportunity to crush their stubborn obstacle. However, Shankar remains loyal to his ailing father's principles as he becomes more embroiled against a plot to destroy everything through his avowed enemies' greedy machinations.

Wow. Openly inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's classic three-time Oscar-winner, 'The Godfather' (1972), this subtitled Hindi gangster flick from video rental store owner turned acclaimed East Indian director Ram Gopal Varma ('Satya' (1998), 'Bhoot' (2003)) is an immediately intense and visually rich production. It's also reportedly the last in the genre trilogy from Varma, and definitely isn't a stereotypical heel-clicking family friendly Masala. Cinematographer Amit Roy's astounding flare for dramatic visuals truly electrifies virtually every scene throughout 'Sarkar', easily making this hundred and twenty-four minute screening a deliciously grim treat from beginning to closing credits. Yes, there are a few similarities to Coppola's masterpiece - particularly in the characterisations of stoic patriarch Subhash Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan's; 'Kyun...! Ho Gaya Na' (2004), 'Black' (2005)) and his two adult sons, brutishly volatile eldest Vishnu (Kay Kay Menon; 'Paanch' (2003), 'Deewaar' (2004)) and soft spoken prodigal Shankar (Abhishek Bachchan; 'Dhoom' (2004), 'Bunty Aur Babli' (2005)). Although far less violent and, thankfully, fuggedaboutin' the usual tired old wise guy clichés, this intriguing drama that unravels a not-so intricate conspiracy to destroy the rather nobly archaic Nagre Family's longstanding and far reaching reign of power in contemporary Mumbai is a lot more artful in its presentation over-all. Manish Gupta's screenplay offers a paying audience fairly intelligent sub plots of betrayal, lost honour and unrequited love, all coming together nicely and deftly taking over where a less assured pen might lazily fill the screen with crazy guns ablazin' and bouts of pyrotechnic calamity. This main cast is astounding, with Bachchan's real life son Abhishek pulling in an incredible performance throughout as Shankar's Michael Corleone-like story arc slowly drags him from being an aspiring legitimate businessman deeper into this blunt underworld fuelled by mortal vengeance. Sure, Menon sustains an extremely gritty tinge of wild menace that beautifully compliments co-star Zakir's chilling scenes as murderously simmering antagonist Rasheed Bhai. Top marks also go to Ravi Kale, as emotionally charged Nagre right hand thug Chandar, as well as to Katrina Kaif and Tanisha Mukherjee (as Shankar's shy love interest Avanti) for their brief yet intriguing peripheral efforts. It's really younger Bachchan's role that makes 'Sarkar' an astounding piece of thoroughly enjoyable escapism. However, because of the curiously uneven and borderline amateurish editing by Nipun Gupta and Amit Parmar, you do need to be patient with this one at times and work a little at concentrating on the rich acting that's steadily bolstered by an astounding instrumental soundtrack from Amar Mohile. My only other minor quibble with this one is that senior Bachchan tends to sleep walk through his scenes, heavily relying on a slightly infuriating minimalist technique bordering on mime that doesn't quite do him justice. The most refreshing aspect of this picture is that it doesn't overdo the criminal brutality to the point of completely numbing you to - or glamourizing - its horrors.

Definitely check out 'Sarkar' as a tremendously worthwhile show that clips along at an impressive pace and predominantly offers up a wealth of remarkably captivating Bollywood talent.

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Sky High
REVIEWED 07/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Fourteen year-old William Theodore Stronghold's (Michael Angarano) first day as a high school freshman was a disaster. All summer long, William had tried to prepare himself for that moment his doting, All-American realtor parents Steve (Kurt Russell) and Josie (Kelly Preston; 'Jerry Maguire' (1996), 'The Cat in the Hat' (2003)) were so excited to see him achieve, but nothing seemed to work out right. He could barely lift weights. His feet never left the ground. Lasers wouldn't shoot from his eyes or fingertips. Whatever genes they'd passed on to him as the renowned super human duo The Commander and Jetstream refused to kick in. It was different for Layla (debuting Danielle Panabaker), his longtime best friend who had realized her special powers over plants and trees when they were still kids, but even she ended up having her first day at Sky High ruined just as much. After their Maxville City yellow school bus had suddenly hurled itself off of that unfinished freeway overpass, sprouted its hidden wings and rocket boosters and had flown Will and Layla and their new classmates to that secret airborne campus for the teenaged sons and daughters of the world's super heroes, every expectation that he would easily follow in his famously strong father's heroic footsteps or inherit his mother's gravity defying crime fighting abilities was resoundingly crushed. Will didn't have any super powers. Layla just didn't want to use hers, so they were both summarily chastised, humiliated and harshly labelled sidekicks by Coach Boomer (Bruce Campbell; 'Army of Darkness' (1993), 'Bubba Ho-tep' (2002)). Automatically ostracised by every other kid who was deemed a hero. Given the far less desirable class schedule for lowly students of Hero Support. Bullied by those who use their extraordinary powers to torment anyone weaker or less remarkable. That was also the awful day young Stronghold saw his first unmistakable enemy, Warren Peace (first timer Steven Strait), the brooding flame throwing son of one of Will's parents' imprisoned arch rivals. The worst part about all of this was in Will trying to figure out how to tell his parents the horrible truth that he's an ordinary human. The best thing about him going there has been meeting lovely student body president and homecoming organizer Gwen Grayson (Mary Elizabeth Winstead; 'The Ring Two' (2005)), whose instant interest in Will threatens his friendship with secretly infatuated Layla and might nicely fit into the malevolent schemes of a shadowy villain bent on destroying the school - and The Commander and Jetstream - once and for all with a devilish chortle.

Fresh with incorrigibly witty comedic asides clearly inspired by almost half a Century of comic book do-gooders and their nefarious foes, this surprisingly familiar live action Disney family flick from director Mike Mitchell ('Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo' (1999), 'Surviving Christmas' (2004)) still tends to play more like a made-for-television romp, as though the phenomenal big screen success of 'The Incredibles' had a lot to do with co-writers Paul Hernandez's, Robert Schooley's and Mark McCorkle's screenplay getting the green light. Sure, it's great to see Uncle Walt's former child star Kurt Russell ('Escape from New York' (1981), 'Miracle' (2004)) basically pay vague homage to his earlier roles as a kind of grown up and muscle bound Dexter Riley from 'The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes' (1970) and 'The Strongest Man in the World' (1975) here as Steve Stronghold/The Commander, as well as watching Linda Carter ('Lightning in a Bottle' (1993), 'Super Troopers' (2001)) portray this super hero high school's Principle Powers while playfully skirting copyright infringement winking and nodding to her former glory starring in TV's 'Wonder Woman' (1976-1979), but a lot of that intended peripheral novelty actually shines as overwhelming high points throughout this otherwise fairly ordinary hundred and two-minute stereotypical morality play tinged with wild special effects. 'Sky High' is almost a soft mannered junior back story to 'The X-Men' (2000) at times, but it's more along the lines of 'The Breakfast Club' (1985) where - as though by some tired unwritten code of latent pariah-like satisfaction - the misfits are made far more appealing to a paying audience than the cliques of popular kids that hardly anyone in real life apparently ever seemed to be a part of. The core premise feels unoriginal. It's a fun time for the wrong reasons. Replace the flying and morphing abilities with, say, accounting skills or sports aptitude, and you'd likely get the same basic film - without the caped crusader wrapping and its cheesy ending reminiscent of 'Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie' (1995), of course. Even the brief appearances of Toronto's Dave Foley's ('Blast from the Past' (1999), 'Intern Academy' (2004)) defeatist Hero Support class instructor Mr. Boy, and Montreal's Kevin McDonald's ('Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy' (1996), 'Galaxy Quest' (1999)) bulbous headed Mad Science lab professor Mr. Medulla, easily steal the spotlight with far more captivating and truly funny moments than those afforded this picture's star, Michael Angarano ('Almost Famous' (2000), 'Lords of Dogtown' (2005)), as the Stronghold's undeveloped son Will enduring his first torturous days of scholastic studies burdened by gossipy expectations within the secret floating campus of Sky High in a contemporary age where Americans having super powers is common and encouraged. Maybe the struggle against bigotry that Will and his sidekick labelled friends deal with under all of this flashy akimbo is part of the point, but it somehow gets lost in the cavalcade. Which is a shame for this primary cast barely given anything new to work with.

Despite its obvious flaws, 'Sky High' is still an enjoyably fun feel good escape that's well worth checking out at the matinee or as a rental for the entire family.

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Stealth
REVIEWED 07/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

It was a bronze ghost against the moon lit skies over Rangoon on its first mission. A menacing blur of cutting edge technology sheathed in a sleek metal and polymer composite exoskeleton, able to skim the high atmosphere at Mach four towards any point on the globe that grizzled US Navy Captain George Cummings (Sam Shepard; 'The Right Stuff' (1983), 'The Notebook' (2004) dispatched it. Much more than a suped up Unmanned Combat Attack Drone, Extreme Deep Invader was the first war-ready stealth fighter completely piloted by fully functional artificial intelligence. It flew rings around Cummings' duo of top gun wing men Carol Wade (Jessica Biel) and Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) led by ace Lieutenant Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas). It had learned from them. E.D.I. (voiced by Wentworth Miller) had observed their human quirks in the arena of battle, recording ever movement and communication and vital sign into its vast onboard neural network of catalogued stratagem and tactical data. Launched from their oceanic platform aboard skeptically suspicious Captain Dick Marshfield's (Joe Morton; 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' (1991), 'Paycheck' (2003)) USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, it had weeded out their flaws and had absorbed the rest. Eddie - this computerized airborne tin man able to satellite uplink and process downloaded classified database intel within milliseconds, loaded with enough arsenal to raze a small city with the cold precision of a surgical strike - had adapted. Evolved. Malfunctioned. Suddenly gone rogue after a lightening hit, now on a deadly flight plan - plotted near strife burdened Tajikastan's eastern border with China - speeding directly into heavily guarded Russian airspace, with Gannon and his crew desperately trying to stop Eddie from igniting an irreversible international calamity. However, the hunted quickly becomes the hunter when Eddie realizes that its former team mates threaten its single minded mission to seek out and destroy its targeted enemy...

There are a couple of moments during this visually impressive yet wildly boring action flick from director Rob Cohen ('The Fast and the Furious' (2001), 'xXx' (2002)) where you could easily expect to hear the line, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL", responded to in that same coldly soothing electronic voice heard almost forty years ago and revived here. Sitting through this turkey's relentless afterglow of blinding orange pyrotechnics and cross eyed inducing bouts of lazily cobbled dialogue and vapid characters, it's as though screenwriter W.D. Richter had finished renting '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) and 'Top Gun' (1986) - and maybe 'Firefox' (1982) and 'Flight of the Navigator' (1986) - and then spent the next couple of hours scratching out this fairly contrived script in the margins of Popular Mechanics magazine picked up to get the ultra cool technobabble right. That's probably not what happened, but you can almost hear the cogs of logic crack and strain to connect each plot point that vaguely underpins what's essentially a series of CGI bloated video game scenarios in desperate need of a story to string them all together into a cohesive feature length movie. You can hear those cogs working hard, but they still fail. So, you get a trio of smug, uninteresting pilots dispatched by their suspiciously dishonourable commander obsessed with a big shiney toy aircraft called EDI (or, Eddie). Let's throw in some foreign enemies hiding within an impenetrable building in some far flung Asian city that require these American Mach four flyers to do some dazzling aerial manoeuvres at night. Yeah, dude. Nuke 'em high, yeah baby yeah. Russia's air force is still intimidating enough, so lets stick a whiz bang dog fight with them in there, too. And, have this AI stealth fighter download all the music from the internet, just because. Smokin'. Intellectually, 'Stealth' is a dismally insulting disaster, where it doesn't seem to really care about the live actors featured in it, why they're there or what they could have brought to the set. So, why should a paying audience? Let the awesome computer graphics wash over you. Be amazed at how cool this prototype flying machine gone awry looks. It's super cool. That's all that matters, right? Lotsa stuff gets blowed up real good, too. Dumb. Sure, despite Cohen's heavy reliance on post-production wizardry to flesh out the apparent thirty minutes of footage occupied by stars Josh Lucas ('Sweet Home Alabama' (2002), 'Around the Bend' (2004)), Jessica Biel ('The Rules of Attraction' (2002), 'Blade: Trinity' (2004)) and pre-Oscar winner Jamie Foxx ('Bait' (2000), 'Ray' (2004)), this otherwise capable cast does manage to personalize their roles just enough for you to at least remember their characters' names. Not that it matters, they could have phoned in their lines. Sponge mops wearing wigs could have stood in without much notice.

'Stealth' will undoubtedly be one of those DVD releases that becomes an overplayed favourite in the display cases of high definition television stores, so feel free to save yourself wasting time and cash at the theatre or rental shop by checking it out there.

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Saving Face
REVIEWED 08/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

They'd first met nineteen years ago, when Manhattan surgeon Wilhemena 'Wil' Wai (Michelle Krusiec) was nine and prima ballerina Vivian Shing (Lynn Chen) was eight. Wil vaguely remembers, but Vivian can still recall every second and every detail of that encounter like it was yesterday. Sitting there in that empty thrift shop of old dresses and shirts and suits, talking candidly about their lives on what really felt like a first date, all that Wai can think about is something that Shing had said to her in the hospital hallway at the third floor candy bar machine the other evening. "Your body knows what you really want," this lithe sultry beauty had smiled at her. She wasn't talking about the fifty cent candy bar behind the glass. They both knew how the other felt. It scared Wil. Her sudden realization of this rippling need to be with Vivian was an overwhelming flood of emotionally liberating and horrifying feelings crashing around within her. What would her mother think? What would her very traditional Chinese Grandparents say? Wilhemena could already hear the gossip cutting a blaze of scandal through her tightly knit community. It would probably rival the hurtful chatter over her forty-eight year-old widowed mother Hwai Lei (Joan Chen) recently becoming pregnant by a secret lover that had resulted in Hwai being unceremoniously tossed out of her stoic aged father Professor Gao's (Jin Wang) household. The shame that news had brought had torn the family apart. Now this? Wil's mother is already starting to drive her nuts, taking over her small apartment and being overly judgmental of everything in her life. This new truth would kill her. Better to keep Vivian a secret affair for now, concentrate on the long shifts at the hospital, and try to help her mother find a good man from the list of few available prospects willing to date towards marriage. However, Vivian wants more. The need for them to be honest about their love is important to her, despite having to slightly bend the truth with her own parents as well. This storm of bad timing gets worse, as Vivian's chance to join a ballet company in Paris seems more of a reality, and these two blissful, confused lovers are faced with some difficult choices that threaten to break far too many hearts.

Admittedly, I've always tended to (until now) secretly dread stepping into a screening that's promoted as specifically being about homosexuals - either male or female - because the majority of Gay Cinema offerings still seem to essentially be about how the screenplay leads up to showing the stars naked in bed simulating foreplay and/or sex for the camera as though it's a big deal in and of itself. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing particularly terrible about scorching up the big screen for a mature audience when it's done well, but I guess I'm still naive enough to expect that there's got to be far more to seriously portraying an openly Gay lifestyle than lazily defaulting to whatever happens between two consenting adults locked in the throes of carnal passion, because, as with sitting through the hetero equivalent, sitting through that tired cliché made the story's predominant event quickly becomes just as boring - regardless of how great the actors might look giving porn a run for its money - as seeing the Gay guy or gal portrayed as a pedantic caricature or automatically dying due to a preference for his or her own gender. It's been done, let's grow up and move on.

That's why first time writer/director Alice Wu's 'Saving Face' is such an absolutely refreshing treat that wonderfully examines the believable complications arising from workaholic unwed young surgeon Wilhemena Wai (Michelle Krusiec; 'Daddy Day Care' (2003), 'Cursed' (2005)) surprising herself by falling in love with prima ballerina Vivian Shing (Lynn Chen; 'Fortune' (2002)) within a closely knit Chinese community already wrestling with Old Fashioned tradition versus contemporary life in New York. Reportedly based on her own experiences, Wu masterfully raises the ante by focusing on the full breadth and depth of this love affair and how it affects everyone involved or skirting the gossipy periphery. This predominantly subtitled, ninety-one minute picture is about the different facets of love, telling that richly awkward story as well as that of Wai's forty-eight year-old widowed mother Hwai Lei (Joan Chen; 'The Last Emperor' (1987), 'Avatar' (2004)), who re-enters the dating field with the help of her daughter and whose strict father Professor Gao (Jin Wang) has foisted shame upon for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. It's an extremely well crafted human drama, as well as an hilariously clever comedy whenever the East meets West culture clash is dealt with. Awesome. Full marks also go to Ato Essandoh ('Garden State' (2004), 'Hitch' (2005)) as Wilhemena's quirky next door neighbour Jay, who easily steals the show during his few scenes of oddball humour. Sure, you still end up seeing a couple of this cinematic gem's stars smooching in the buff for a momentarily leering lens, but there's so much more to the story arcs than them merely culminating in crescendos of sweaty titillation. You see change and character growth on all levels, making this Gay Cinema offering an incredibly satisfying time at the movies.

Definitely do yourself a huge favour and check out 'Saving Face' for its insightful portrayals deftly realized by this great cast of talent.

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The Skeleton Key
REVIEWED 08/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

The sprawling Devereaux manor of thirty dimly lit rooms seemed like an ancient, weather beaten box of secrets in its shroud of gnarled trees that banked the Louisiana swamp surrounding that isolated property. As her Volkswagen Beetle carried her along the narrow dirt driveway leading away from the main road that had brought her to this job interview from nearby New Orleans, Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson) unconsciously caught her breath at first sight of that hunched wooden house ominously awaiting her arrival. The Devereaux's, Ben (John Hurt) and Violet (Gena Rowlands), seemed strangely apprehensive about her being there. Particularly Violet, whose uncertainty about an outsider moving into their rambling home to help care for her aged and invalid husband, was clearly obvious. Ellis wasn't welcome. If their estate lawyer, young Luke Marshall (Peter Sarsgaard), hadn't stepped in to convince Violet that she'd find nobody else more suited for the position, Caroline would probably still be volunteering at the hospital, reading to her dying patients in the Geriatric Ward, paying witness to their final breath. She would be working the same hours. She would be sleeping in her own bed. She would be safe. It was the noise breaking the night's sultry calm that had first piqued Caroline's curiosity about the attic. The skeleton key that Violet had given her was supposed to open every door standing locked for years within these creaking walls and hallways. So, she had quietly opened that door at the end of the second floor hall and had then unlocked the one at the top of the old wooden staircase beyond, stepping into that dark and dusty storage room of vaguely forgotten relics where Ben had suffered the debilitating stroke that had left him as helpless as a lamb. Caroline's venture into a shadowy corner of this elderly couple's Century-old mansion might have ended there, if the noise that had wakened her from her sleep had stopped. It was coming from the far wall. It was coming from behind the shelves. From behind a partially hidden door in the far wall that her key wouldn't open. Something was trying to get out. A presence that shouldn't have been in there, but was. Someone who knew that Caroline was in this house. Something immortal that doesn't want her to ever leave...

Feeling a lot like a retooled episode of classic television's 'The Twilight Zone', this slothful creep show from Brit director Iain Softley ('Hackers' (1995), 'K-PAX' (2001)) seems to be part of a new breed of horror movie - one that includes 'Dark Water' (2005) and 'Gothika' (2003) - that parachutes memorably talented dramatic actors into stories that attempt to be more psychological thrillers than all out gore fests. Which would be fine, if the psychological aspects were actually thrilling. 'The Skeleton Key' isn't. The acting is pretty good throughout, but it's pretty well wasted because this isn't really a character-driven offering. It's more of an aggravatingly vague primer for the uninitiated curious about hoodoo, a Cajun form of black magic, with Kate Hudson's ('Almost Famous' (2000), 'Raising Helen' (2004)) emotionally brittle Geriatric Ward volunteer Caroline Ellis stumbling into this arcane world as your unwitting tour guide turned endangered amateur sleuth trying to unravel the mysterious debilitation of her bed-ridden Bayou patient Ben Devereaux (played as terrified wrinkled Mime by Oscar nominated John Hurt; 'Alien' (1979), 'Hellboy' (2004)). The main problem with this torturously drawn out hundred and four-minute cinematic sleeping pill is that screenwriter Ehren Kruger's script doesn't really go anywhere, curiously obsessing on what really should have been the precursors to the actual film that's never made. Frankly, I was hoping to see a deliciously frightful adaptation of the Alec Baldwin/Meg Ryan romantic comedy 'Prelude to a Kiss' (1992) as this feature's underlying magical scheme slowly, teasingly, achingly revealed itself, but I ended up leaving the closing credits hugely disappointed that it didn't even spend much time fleshing out the body snatching switcheroo history that predates Ellis ever setting foot inside the Devereaux's isolated manor. That should have been the movie, where you're shown what happens after these immortal possessions in almost the same manner seen in 'Face/Off' (1997), or perhaps 'The Hidden' (1987). Even if Hudson's character had realized halfway through what was clearly going on, and was forced to run for her life while being chased by Ben's suspiciously amicable wife Violet (Gena Rowlands; 'A Woman Under the Influence' (1974), 'The Notebook' (2004)) and maybe their personable estate lawyer Luke Marshall (Peter Sarsgaard; 'The Man in the Iron Mask' (1998), 'Garden State' (2004)), this boring disaster might have reached its potential level as an enjoyable nail biter.

As it stands, 'The Skeleton Key' definitely offers up loads of simmering weirdness, but falls flat when the time comes for it to shock your socks off. Sadly, you're probably better off trusting your gut and not stepping into the dark room if this turkey is playing on its big screen.

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The Syrian Bride
REVIEWED 08/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Wow. I had a gut feeling that this subtitled 2004 Israeli offering from acclaimed writer/director Eran Riklis ('Vegvul Natan' (1999)) was going to be good, but I was still left gob smacked by the resulting efforts from this incredible main cast of supporting actors. Yes, 'Ha-Kala Ha-Surit' (its original Hebrew title) is primarily about twenty-five year-old Arab Druze bride Mona Salman (Clara Khoury) leaving the Majdal Shams village house of her stoic, politically contentious father Hammed (Khoury's real father, Makram Khoury; 'The Body' (2001)) in the Golan Heights - the volcanic sliver of peacefully disputed territory between Israel and Syria - to marry popular Syrian television star Tallel (Derar Sliman), who waits for her at the military guarded border to meet her for the first time. However, it's the supporting cast powerfully headed by Hiyam Abbass ('Satin Rouge' (2002)) as Mona's emotionally simmering older sister Amal and Eyad Sheety as their torturously estranged eldest brother Hattem that truly make this astounding ninety-seven minute drama such an immensely worthwhile screening.

Their individual peripheral moments crackle with unspoken intensity from the first moment you realize these characters' stories until this picture's wonderfully fulfilling last scene fades into the closing credits. Awesome. The brief strands of comedy relief throughout are delightfully charming as well. Riklis' and co-writer Suha Arraf's carefully crafted screenplay thankfully seems to realize that a paying audience is intelligent enough to pick up on the larger strifes of this region that have left an indelible imprint clearly seen in every small inflection and gesture from this splintered family. You don't need a history lesson to feel what's happening is believable. You see it in their faces. You sense their frustration, as though you were there. Mona finally smiles, and your heart drops. Quite frankly, I can't say enough good things about this masterful French/German/Israeli co-production without giving too much of it away. Absolutely check out 'The Syrian Bride' as an absolutely enjoyable foreign feature populated with astounding talent that's well worth the price of admission.

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A Sound of Thunder
REVIEWED 09/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Travis Ryer (Edward Burns; 'Life or Something Like It' (2002), 'Confidence' (2003)) was a scientist, not a tour guide. He specialized in genetics, not trophies. He didn't care about the contract that had reduced him to being an obedient pet for Time Safari Incorporated. The script they'd given him was a joke. Ryer pitied the well-moneyed clients who signed up two years in advance just to suit up in fake camouflaged gear and live the five-minute fantasy of hunting the rarest of wild game. Those weekend warriors could have just as easily shot at lions in Africa, if there were any lions left. It had been ages since a plague had wiped out Earth's animals untouched by foolish human tampering. Nothing remained of them, except for a few holographic recordings. Fragile ghosts. As extinct as the dinosaurs. Just like the roaring Allosaurus that, like clockwork, breached that prehistoric jungle to stand face to face with Ryer's team of time travellers on every jaunt. Massive. Hungry. Terrifying. Time Safari made the journey from 2055 AD back sixty-five million years to the Cretaceus Period a reality, but Travis didn't have to like it. Outcast University scientist Sonya Rand (Catherine McCormack; 'Braveheart' (1995), 'Spy Game' (2001)) hated it even more, even though she had originally designed the sophisticated mainframe that controlled every aspect of the claustrophobic time chamber, the hovering pathway that ensured nothing else was altered or left behind, and their safe return to that Chicago-based laboratory. But, something had gone terribly wrong. Ryer's gun hadn't worked when it was supposed to, and their two panicked clients had disappeared from sight, while the rest of the hunting party diverted that giant reptile's attention long enough for the gun to be fixed and fire the kill shot. They had survived it, but the incident had cut too close. Just like the next time they'd gone back, and had nearly escaped being killed by the fallout of an erupting volcano. Time had changed. Back then, and in the 21st Century. Huge tropical plants now ploughed their roots through the city's pavement, and trees never before seen towered over the tall buildings. Rand knew what had happened. She'd seen the waves that were heralding in this impending catastrophe ripple over the horizon and transform the future into a hybrid with the past. Ryer couldn't believe it, until the next storm thundered over them, and the city reverted even further into an overgrown jungle pulsing with creatures from another age. Something had happened to disrupt the evolutionary time line. The animals had returned, mutated by millions of years that never should have happened. They needed to find a way to go back. Ryer had to make things right. To save Mankind from never existing.

Well, at least they spelled the title right. This one's loosely inspired by prolific American Sci-Fi writer Ray Douglas Bradbury's classic short story adapted for an episode of television's 'The Ray Bradbury Theater' (1985-1992) - although, I'm almost certain that I saw it on the old 'Twilight Zone' or 'The Outer Limits' TV show - and reportedly first published in his 1952 compilation R is for Rocket. It's a famous tale, where a big game hunter from 2055 AD unwittingly changes the outcome of World War II during a jungle safari in 60,000,000 BC - by inadvertently squashing a prehistoric butterfly. Bradbury's original brings a Century of world domination to Hitler's Nazi Party of the 1940's. The screenplay by co-writing team Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer (they scripted 'Sahara' (2005) and 'Thoughtcrimes' (2003)), along with Gregory Poirier ('For Your Thighs Only' (1984), 'National Treasure 2' (2007)), pretty well changes everything for the sake of change. I guess longtime director Peter Hyams ('Capricorn One' (1978), '2010' (1984), 'Timecop' (1994)) wanted to shake things up. Dinosaurs over run the future this time out, after something is changed in the Cretaceus Period that grants those familiar giant lizards an extra half a billion years of extinction-free evolution. Quite frankly, I'm disappointed that the script turns Bradbury's story into a lame adaptation of 'The Lost World' (1925), when Hyams' version could have easily expanded upon the original short story to include those cheesy time ripples that bring their towering man-eating vines and human-sized baboon lizards to Nazi-occupied downtown Chicago. Before the alien invasion on flying broomsticks, and the Moon crashing into the Sun. Just to shake things up. No Nazis here, though. Let's face it, Hollywood has only gotten time travel flicks right less than a dozen times over the last hundred years. 'A Sound of Thunder' isn't one of them. It's a sham. Sure, Ben Kingsley ('Gandhi' (1982), 'Suspect Zero' (2004)) obviously has a blast playing Time Safari's Machiavellian owner Charles Hatton, but the role's a series of costumed visitations for the most part. The rest of the cast is reduced to being live action finger puppets edited in as guests. The real star of this silly reptilian turkey is the extremely amateurish special effects from the Eighties used throughout. Cheap, and without substance. I did read that work stopped in 2002 because of flooding on location in Romania, and the lack of finances closed up shop for a while, but didn't anybody look at the final cut before dropping it in the mail? Yeesh. Forget this lame movie, reread the classic instead.

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Salaam Namaste
REVIEWED 09/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Well, I sure could've lived without the blatant racism - on the screen and in the theatre - while sitting through this otherwise wonderfully realized Bollywood romantic comedy from co-writer and debuting director Siddharth Anand. Saif Ali Khan ('Dil Chahta Hai' (2001), 'Hum Tum' (2004)) and Preity Zinta ('Kal Ho Naa Ho' (2003), 'Veer-Zaara' (2004)) are astoundingly captivating naturals here, playing Melbourne, Australia's passionately free spirited master chef Nikhil 'Nick' Arora and prim yet feisty 101.5 FM morning radio deejay Ambar Malhotra. Yes, this three-song Masala's definitely a contemporary and non-traditional tale that's obviously geared more for a mature paying audience desensitized to some of the provocative aspects of Western society, but 'Salaam Namaste' is still basically a sweetly tormented boy-meets-girl saga at its core. The life of the primary relationship feels real, and continually crackles with outstanding cleverness and sheer perfection as opposites Arora and Malhotra clash over his no-show on air interview with her, flirt unaware of each other's identity, and end up moving in together in an initially ill-conceived moment of simmering mutual admiration that turns serious before they're both ready to commit.

Sure, it takes a while to find its ground as more than a popcorn crowd pleaser, and the premise rife with hit and miss peripheral silliness - such as Jaaved Jaaffery's ('Lashkar' (1989), 'Sandhya' (2003)) bizarre spoof of '"Crocodile" Dundee' (1986), Arshad Warsi (Munnabhai M.B.B.S.' (2003), 'Hulchul' (2004)) grumbling over women and marriage as Nick's pal Ron, and an eventually very pregnant Zinta dancing to Hip Hop - is fairly contrived, but that attention to purely dramatic detail mentioned above is what actually makes this brightly presented gem overwhelmingly well worth the price of admission. You see this young couple grow from being lovably quirky caricatures into becoming truly empathetic and fleshed out characters throughout the course of this subtitled Hindi flick's surprisingly fast hundred and fifty-eight minute run time. Awesome. I'd read that this offering is basically a Bollywood remake of 'Nine Months' (1995) but, while there are definitely similarities, Khan and Zinta easily make the basic story their own to the point where it feels entirely different and fresher than simply being a Mumbaian knock off of that Hugh Grant/Julianne Moore romp. Absolutely check out 'Salaam Namaste' for a thoroughly enjoyable time with this astounding cast of amazing talent.

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Serenity
REVIEWED 10/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Admittedly, I've never sat through a complete episode of the Sci-Fi Western 'Firefly' (2002-2003), but this fairly unabsorbing feature-length debut from television writer/director Joss Whedon ('Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (1997-2003), 'Angel' (1999-2004)) definitely feels like a carry over from the small screen for fans of that short-lived show. Much like with the movie versions of TV's 'Star Trek' (1966-1969) and 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' (1987-1994), 'Serenity' gathers up many of the familiar characters and plunks them onto a larger cinematic canvas to present a script that seems as though you've already seen the compressed version of, with commercial breaks, at home. All of these characters are basically well-worn stereotypes, from the pragmatic Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds (Edmonton's Nathan Fillion; 'Blast from the Past' (1999), 'Dracula 2000' (2000)) with a dented heart of gold, to the strong Sigourney Weaver-like self-positioned First Mate Zoe (Gina Torres; 'Bed of Roses' (1996), 'The Matrix Revolutions' (2003)) and the surly trigger-happy grunt Jayne (Adam Baldwin; 'Independence Day' (1996), 'The Patriot' (2000)), as this motley crew face impossible odds against an Empire-like Alliance army led by a shadowy government operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor; 'Dirty Pretty Things' (2002), 'Four Brothers' (2005)) and - gee, what a surprise - nasty hordes of spaceship-flying cannibals (called Weavers, funnily enough) torn from pretty well every marauding Undead flick since 'Dawn of the Dead' (1978), while racing to deduce a somewhat unimportant mystery involving psychic fighting prodigy passenger River (Christina Ricci look alike Summer Glau) and an uncharted planet. They may as well have been running from killer sponge mops, considering the lack of thought put into those two groups of baddies.

Deep shades of the 'Star Wars' universe almost immediately come into play here, as though contemporary Science Fiction has no other alternative but to regurgitate the same superficial themes that inspired Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) and George Lucas decades ago. There's nothing new, under the surface. Each explosion of choreographed, slightly cheesy violence set to a trippy beat is pretty well inserted in an attempt to keep you from drifting into a coma from having to wade through this mob of unimaginative human finger puppets. And, that's a shame. Sure, it's fun hearing a lot of dialogue that sounds like it was forged at the OK Corral and then retooled for a lasergun shoot 'em up lovin' contemporary paying audience. And yes, a lot of the CGI-heavy special effects are impressive. Those aspects aren't really enough to justify the crossover, though. 'Firefly: The Movie' (its working title) still feels more like an extended swan song for the small screen series, in both its lack of tangible character development and lazy plot, that was merely transplanted into theatres with the same production values because the opportunity to do so was there, rather than something completely fresh and strongly embellished for regular moviegoers who've enjoyed great things from this genre. If you loved the TV program, this flick is absolutely made specifically for you. Otherwise, you're probably better off waiting a couple of minutes until 'Serenity' hits the loop on the Space Channel's movie roster.

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Stay
REVIEWED 10/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

He (Ryan Gosling) sat in the night. On the Brooklyn Bridge. Damaged. In traffic. Beside the burning car. Henry Letham sat in the car. Behind the wheel. Happy. That chilled night. Beside the girl (Elizabeth Reaser) he planned to marry. Henry (Ryan Gosling) stood in the psychiatrist's office. Who was this Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) talking to him now? Curious. In this dead city. Under a cloud of voices. Sam (Ewan McGregor) nervously fingered at the wedding ring in his pocket. He loved Lila (Naomi Watts; 'Mulholland Dr.' (2001), '21 Grams' (2003)). Fragile. "There's too much beauty," she'd told Sam to tell Henry. A message from one suicide survivor to a tormented soul planning to take his own life on Saturday. Why? Foster had three days to find out. In this maze of questions answered with more questions. Henry stared at the water. At the fountain in the park. Alone. "Is that man going to die?" said the child to his mother as they walked by him. It was him, with a balloon, as a boy. "He's not gonna make it," the old man had whispered to the old woman at the zoo's walrus tank where Henry used to go as a kid. He stood at the aquarium's glass wall. Watching those creatures glide through the depths. The water. The car's fire. The sharp breeze in the air. His (Ryan Gosling) senses were locked on overload, breathing in everything around him, cutting him from the inside outwards. Sam (Ewan McGregor) was the answer. He knew, but didn't know how. Confusion ruptured this illusion of reality. The girl (Elizabeth Reaser) in the car laughed. Henry's parents smiled. Henry's parents were dead. The girl, dead. Sam went to Henry's mother, but she didn't have any answers for him. He dog attacked him. The dog was dead, too. Nothing makes any sense to Foster. It's all fractured. The bridge is broken. Letham's paintings of the bridge are everywhere. Stark. Heavy acrylics on skin tight canvas. Henry sat at the bar. Raining outside. The girl danced on the bar. They all stared. His life, a series of faded images, soiled by her writhing flesh in that smoky place. Broken faces. No answers. Just shards. Just pain.

Remember the famous scene in 'A Clockwork Orange' (1971), when Malcolm McDowell's character was strapped to a chair with his eyelids wrenched open while a flurry of images was projected in front of his tortured face? Well, I'm pretty sure that's what I looked like while sitting through the majority of this experimental turkey from director Marc Forster ('Monster's Ball' (2001), 'Finding Neverland' (2004)) about Manhattan psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor; 'Trainspotting' (1996), 'Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith' (2005)) entering the fractured, haunted world of tormented college student Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling; 'Remember the Titans' (2000), 'The Notebook' (2004)) mere days before the latter's planned suicide attempt. 'Stay' can't keep still long enough to make any coherent sense, with regards to David Benioff's screenplay actually bothering to tell an accessible story. It's all clips mashed together, vaguely strung together by having the same actors appear in them. Sure, it's clear that this wildly demanding, ninety-eight minute cerebral free fall is in some ways inspired by the comparably superior '21 grams' (2003), with a visual style virtually torn from some of the incredibly memorable sequences enjoyed in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (2004). However, a paying audience probably needs to ingest some dangerously serious drugs to keep up with this flick, if you want it to be more than the frenetic jumble of sometimes gorgeous and horrific splinters of psychedelic colours and sounds that brutally wash over you throughout. I can see what Forster and Benioff were attempting to do, using the notion that your life passes before your eyes at the moment of extreme trauma or death, and artfully injecting and rearranging those memories with strangers that end up being chewed through the resulting tumult of dream-like semi-consciousness, but it doesn't work as presented here. In small doses within a more linear telling, it probably would have succeeded. An underpinning of specifically recognizable context is drastically missing, leaving you completely lost in this manic world and overwhelmingly disinterested in caring about what few clues are tossed your way during the last couple of minutes. Your amateur sleuthing genes work overtime trying to cobble together a sensible finale that ends up exceeding this stinker's anti-climactic pay-off. In other words, unfortunately, 'Stay' is far too relentlessly esoteric and self-indulgent for its own good. Sure, McGregor and Gosling do pull some compelling scenes out of this cinematic hodge podge, but they seem just as confused as I did, merely compounding a sense of aggravation in the air conditioned darkness until the closing credits finally granted sweet sweet release.

Unless you're in desperate need of suffering an instant and lasting migraine, stay with any of the other big screen or rental choices, and stay clear of this beautiful-looking nonsensical disaster.

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Saw 2
REVIEWED 10/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Amanda (Shawnee Smith; 'Who's Harry Crumb?' (1989), 'Saw' (2004)) was the last to awaken. All seven of them had apparently been secreted away against their will and left in that house to die an agonizing and mutilating death at the distant hands of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell). The Game was explained to them on the small tape player that Amanda, a former survivor of Jigsaw's maniacal chamber of tortured lessons, had clawed out of the brick wall of their isolated room. In three hours, the doors of that ramshackle house of horrors would automatically open and all of them would be released. Waiting wasn't an option, though. They really had two hours to solve the clues left for them, before the poison gas seeping from the vents would melt their lungs and drown them in their own blood. Oh yes, there will be blood. There always was. However, that wasn't the point of The Game. The gas. That claustrophobic room. The glass syringes of antidote locked in that heavy safe in the middle of that room, and hidden throughout that dilapidated home of dark mazes. Jigsaw's chortling tape recorded riddle taunting them, telling them that the safe's combination was at the back of their minds. All of that was carefully and deliberately constructed to inspire their survival instincts in the face of mortal dangers. To give them a very real choice between life and death. To change their wasted lives. As the first of them to go lay in a pool of his own blood from a bullet to the head, time was ticking on the bank of monitors that Homicide Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) had uncovered in Jigsaw's workshop miles away. They had caught him. The S.W.A.T. team, Eric's former partner and self-professed expert on this ghoulish serial killer, and Matthews were all ready to save those lives, but Jigsaw wasn't ready to end The Game just yet. He had been waiting for them. Now, they would have to wait, and watch in helpless terror, as each trap took another soul. Matthews would have to sit across from Jigsaw in that warehouse of devilish contraptions a little longer, listening to this pathetic psychopath, while Eric's teenaged son Dan (Erik Knudsen) endured The Game along with the dwindling number of kidnapped victims shown on those monitors...

I still remember panning the first one, but this comparably much better sequel of 'Saw' (2004) from debuting feature co-writer/director Darren Lynn Bousman tones down the gore enough to actually tell a reasonably captivating - albeit still overtly cheesy and gruesome - psychological thriller here. This time out, seven brutally kidnapped strangers awaken in an abandoned and barricaded house to find that they have two hours to discover clues left for them by terminal cancer victim turned manipulative serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell; 'The Quick and the Dead' (1995), 'The Road to El Dorado' (2000)), while the sarin-like gas they've been breathing slowly poisons them towards painful and mutilated death. Pretty well all of the familiar aspects of 'Saw' are here, but you're given more of a comprehensive mystery to sink your amateur sleuthing teeth into. A paying audience is also given a cast of relatively fleshed out stereotypes this time out, rather than simply watching another round of doomed chattel locked in a fog of boring panic as they're encouraged to hack off bits of themselves. Sure, this ninety-one minuter is still a fairly undemanding slasher flick at its core, with hapless victims scurrying away from or towards their inevitably grisly demise throughout, but the way that Bousman's and Leigh Whannell's screenplay somewhat attempts to make clever use of those characters - as well as the intensifying dynamic examined at close quarters between Jigsaw and burned out Homicide Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg; 'The Sixth Sense' (1999), 'Dreamcatcher' (2003)) - is admittedly exhilarating and satisfying over-all. The dialogue isn't particularly brilliant, and the acting is fairly forgettable for the most part, but the structure of this horror is wonderfully original and easily sustains momentum at an impressive click. My only real problem is with the somewhat lazy ending. I hated this effort's pretentious, unnecessarily self-gratifying need to force you to sit through a speeded up replay of everything that you've just seen during the screening, but that's not what I mean. What transpires, once the big surprise and the plot twist is finally revealed, really could have been handled much better before the closing credits roll. It felt trite and tacked on as a sneaky after thought.

Definitely check out this thoroughly gory ride that features a better story than the original did, as a worthwhile rental for die hard horror fans.

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Shaadi No.1
REVIEWED 11/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

It was fate that had landed Raj (Fardeen Khan), Veer (Zayed Khan) and Aryan (Sharman Joshi) their lucrative jobs working for Global Cosmetics, and now fate had turned against them at the worst possible time in the form of Lukhwinder "Lucky" Singh (Sanjay Dutt) landing on their doorsteps. Only days earlier, this trio of fun-loving pals had accepted the unusual task of flying to the South of France to seduce their boss Mr. Khothari's three free spirited daughters at his insistence. Oddly enough, this was a plan to convince the girls to take marriage seriously, once the boys had successfully broken their hearts. Okay, so the plan had its flaws. What's even more imperfect is that Raj and his buddies went along with this to keep their jobs, but risk ruining their marriages in the process of playing free wheeling lover boys. Then again, Raj is fed up with his homemaker wife Bhavana's (Ayesha Takia) month-long prayers of luck hopeful celibacy. Veer is also fed up with his aspiring actress wife Diya (Esha Deol) abstaining from consummating their love, and Aryan can't cope with his marital lawyer wife Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) preferring to sleep with a mountain of paperwork than with him. On the other hand, Khothari's lovely daughters seem most receptive to their advances, once the guys manage to save each of those women from the dangers falsely manufactured in order to get their devoted attention. However, this blissful fun and frolic in far flung places seemed threatened when Khothari's impatience wore thin that the dating game was going into triple overtime, and he sent the boys home to their wives and his girls unexpectedly deciding to follow them back to India. Enter Lucky, who's just seen Raj and Veer and Aryan secretively playing with their new girlfriends in public, and is determined to ensure that their luck runs out and that their wives are rid of these philanderers as quickly and as painfully as possible.

This ridiculously fluffy subtitled comedy from director David Dhawan almost seems like the European location shoots weren't the only things financed by someone's frequent flyer air miles and little else, frankly. This entire hundred and thirty-seven minute live action cartoon plays out like an afterthought of goofy hijinx loosely held together by hokey pretense as a kind of vacation in front of the camera for this otherwise impressive cast until the real movie offers come in. Sure, from a music video standpoint, this Bollywood Masala of aggravatingly silly Bimbette wiggle dance numbers is definitely flashy and sporadically toe-tapping for the most part. However, it's so incredibly vacuous and sometimes laughably lazy in continuity as it follows the rather juvenile escapades of friends Raj (Fardeen Khan; 'Prem Aggan' (1998), 'No Entry' (2005)), Veer (Zayed Khan; 'Main Hoon Na' (2004), 'Dus' (2005)) and Aryan (Sharman Joshi; 'Xcuse Me' (2003)) being volunteered by their boss to seduce and then break the hearts of his three "too modern" daughters in the hopes of making his girls want to get married - despite Raj and pals doing that threatening their already strained marriages if they're found out. Of course, their frigid naïve wives - Bhavana (Ayesha Takia; 'Taarzan: The Wonder Car' (2004)), Diya (Esha Deol; 'Dhoom' (2004), 'Kaal' (2005)) and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan; 'Dil Maange More!!!' (2004), 'Antar Mahal' (2005)) - are loosely related, so visiting distant relative and maxim-espousing, nosy guest Lukhwinder "Lucky" Singh (Sanjay Dutt; 'Vaastav: The Reality' (1999), 'Deewaar' (2004)) soon discovers the scandal afoot. But, who cares? None of these characters are even remotely compelling beyond these stars' undeniable screen presence, and, except for one truly hilarious scene and a load of wasted comedic opportunities, 'Shaadi No.1' completely fails to be original or reach its full potential as a thoroughly entertaining, over-the-top romp. A lot of this stuff feels like it was done much better by Dean Martin (1917-1995) and Jerry Lewis half a Century ago. Yawn.

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Separate Lies
REVIEWED 11/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

A chilled damp breeze lapped against the trembling window of Hardy, Manning & Rice law firm partner and respected solicitor James Manning's (Tom Wilkinson) London office. The clock. His expensive desk. The file folder of neatly typed papers in front of him. They all seemed foreign and rather inconsequential to him these days, and James was completely at a loss as to what should be done. This mess was his wife Anne's (Emily Watson) fault. No... it was, but not really. It was that damned blighter Bill Bule's (Rupert Everett) doing. That's what James wanted to believe. No. He wanted to see the facts clearly, and swiftly draw the conclusion that it was Bill's fault that Anne had left him. But, it wasn't as simple as that. A man was dead, for God's sake. Maggie, the Manning's trusted housekeeper of their comfortable getaway cottage in the posh rural town of Buckinghamshire, had been widowed by a terrible hit-and-run accident, and James was at a loss as to how to figure it all out in his head. Rage. Guilt. Denial. An entire gamut of emotions thundered through him at these two tragedies that now shattered his life. Maggie was sure that it was Bill's Range Rover that had killed her husband on that lonely road before Ann's party. James had seen the scratch left by the man's bicycle handle, later that night, when Anne had appeared at the train station with Bule in tow to bring James home from a late meeting. Bill hadn't denied it later on, over lunch, but had warned Manning to leave the whole affair alone. James couldn't do that in good conscience, but now he wasn't so sure. She was with him that night, and earlier. Anne admitted as much. James didn't want to think about it anymore. There were no easy solutions, and the police were now asking too many questions about what Bill had told him to say...

Feeling a lot like a peripheral story plucked from a Brit television series, this surprisingly bland screen adaptation of novelist Nigel Balchin's 1977 book, A Way Through the Wood, from writer/director Julian Fellowes definitely has a lot going for it with this otherwise talented cast of players. Unfortunately, 'Separate Lies' fails to kick start its story of an infidelity-tinged hit and run car accident involving stuffy London solicitor James Manning's (Tom Wilkinson; 'Shakespeare in Love' (1998), 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' (2005)) desperate housewife Anne (Emily Watson; 'Red Dragon' (2002), 'Corpse Bride' (2005)) and her smug Upper Class lover William "Bill" Bule (Rupert Everett; 'My Best Friend's Wedding' (1997), 'Stage Beauty' (2004). This entire eighty-five minute movie is unnecessarily monotonous where it should be incredibly captivating, and annoyingly flat during scenes of potentially riveting moments as these characters' lies begin to entangle and unravel their comfortably dreary lives. Sure, the acting throughout is near-impeccable, but there really isn't much for this small primary cast to work with over-all. Manning's just discovered that Ann has been sleeping with a younger man - Bill - who James could barely put up with before knowing, but hardly puts up a fuss. Ann and Bill are suspected of accidentally killing the husband of the Manning's Buckinghamshire housekeeper Maggie (Linda Bassett) - who Bill accused of theft eight years earlier - but it's all considered trivial and overwhelmingly underplayed, completely sucking any potentially intriguing conflict from pretty well every scene. Specifically, 'Separate Lies' is far too civilized for its own good. To the point where you could probably step out after the first fifteen minutes of this screening and come back half an hour later without feeling as though you'd missed a whole lot. I hate to say it, because this truly is a wonderful cast worth celebrating, but steer clear of this dreadfully dull snooze fest of missed opportunities.

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Shopgirl
REVIEWED 11/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

It needed to be blacker. Mirabel Buttersfield (Claire Danes) pressed the thick stick of charcoal harder into the paper, as her hand busily worked at bringing her artwork closer to what she'd visualized. The slightly blurry Polaroid she'd taken of herself laying naked on the bed of her small Los Angeles apartment was only the basis of what she wanted to convey in her drawing, and the background definitely needed to be a lot more black and heavy. Like the future. Like her life. Collecting a pay cheque for basically standing for eight or ten hours behind the glove counter that was shoved into the back with the dark and boring drapes of the third floor gown room of Saks Fifth Avenue was hardly rewarding. It covered her rent and gas and food, and slowly chipped away at her student loan, but selling gloves wasn't her bliss. Mirabel was an artist. She people watched. She imagined and sketched. From the sidelines of her tiny, unassuming world. Okay, let's face it. She was ignored. A faceless cog. Things needed to change. What she didn't expect was how things would change for her, or how drastic and confusing and wonderful it would be. Her date with Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) had been peculiar, but Mirabel had decided that Jeremy was a peculiar guy anyway. Her date with Ray (Steve Martin) had been more comfortable, but also in a peculiar sort of way. It wasn't really a difficult choice for her to be with Ray in the end, because Jeremy had suddenly decided to go on the road with a band as part of his visionary idea of selling cool-looking amplifiers like cars or swords or something really cool like that. Mirabel chose Ray, because he had chosen her and was still around - whenever Ray was in town. The charcoal layered the paper in another dense coating of blackness that slowly inched closer to the shapeless white space below the centrepoint that would eventually become her self portrait. Things were looking brighter. She loved how her drawing was progressing. She was in love. She was taking shape. She was living, just as Ray was having second thoughts.

Having read comedian turned screenwriter Steve Martin's humourously melancholic 2002 novella, I was looking forward to seeing director Anand Tucker's ('Saint-Ex' (1996)) adaptation starring Claire Danes ('The Hours' (2002), 'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines' (2003)) as introverted Los Angeles artist and virtually ignored Saks Fifth Avenue glove counter clerk Mirabel Buttersfield awkwardly dealing with her two unexpected suitors, silkscreening visionary Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman; 'Slackers' (2002), 'I Heart Huckabees' (2004)) and much older businessman Ray Porter (Steve Martin; 'Father of the Bride Part II' (1995), 'Cheaper by the Dozen' (2003)). In some ways, 'Shopgirl' is better than the book in that this hundred and four-minuter boils down a lot of the peripheral back stories and internal monologues to offer up a cleaner, albeit mature themed linear story of love's evolution within this unassuming young woman's life. The ending is also much more satisfying. However, it's also fairly plodding from the start, as well as made slightly aggravating by Martin's rather purple narratives and a heavy reliance on Danes' Mime-like quirky coyness throughout. All of these characters are basically left uninteresting and one-dimensional in nature, never really allowing a paying audience to feel particularly connected to whatever's going on inside their heads as they dance around each other. Martin's manuscript was an over-all enjoyable cerebral exercise, but his script barely manages to translate that delicately realized work out of intellect and emotion onto the big screen. For instance, while Ray's relationship with Mirabel is sex-based, his feelings are primarily, oddly, paternal, but there are hardly any obvious visual clues seen here to underline or embellish upon that dynamic as a self-sufficient effort existing beyond the original pages. Anyone who's read the book will also likely be surprised to see that the entire use of gloves is changed, despite that aspect actually making sense here. Fascinating insight and big laughs are completely missing too, making 'Shopgirl' unnecessarily coma-inducing and predominantly uneventful, until otherwise deliciously antagonistic Saks perfume sales vixen Lisa (Bridgette Wilson; 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' (1997), 'Extreme Ops' (2002)) is lazily tossed into the fray to spice up the last act. Over-all, this film really does seem completely unconvinced by itself, unwilling to work towards its potential as either an artfully clever series of intertwined arcs or a witty romp of comedic errors inspired by European Cinema. That's truly a shame.

Cinephiles might enjoy this disappointing turkey as an unintended follow up to the slightly better but similarly life-sucking 'Broken Flowers' (2005), but why bother? You're still better off simply reading the novella.

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The Squid and The Whale
REVIEWED 12/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

"I wish you didn't have so many freckles on your face," Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) said, staring intently, mere inches from Sophie Greenberg's (Halley Feiffer; 'You Can Count on Me' (2000)) frown while she finished wiping up after him. Walt Berkman liked Sophie - a little bit more after she'd just finished sexually pleasuring him - but still, in more of a prosaic way than anything else. This was what unassumingly brilliant high school teenagers like him needed to endure as a common life experience after-all. He chatted her up in Science Class, she became his girlfriend, it got boring, and then it was her job to make him happy. He could use it later, when he felt the need to write another song, right? The first song that he'd written - a song that he really would have written, if Roger Waters hadn't written and recorded it for Pink Floyd's The Wall album first - went over really well at the school's talent night... That seemed be how it was for his parents. The romance, the subsequent boredom, the inevitable burden of obligation. Before they'd suddenly separated. However, Walt's mother Joan (Laura Linney) had failed his father Bernard (Jeff Daniels). Judging from the continual revelations regarding Joan's philandering during the past few years, she'd clearly failed Bernard quite a lot. With different men. Sometimes in the Berkman's Brooklyn two-storey brownstone, under the unwitting noses of Walt and his younger brother Frank. It was disgusting to think about, really. It didn't make any sense. Why had they gotten married in the first place, if Joan was going to do this to them? To Bernard, a brilliant novelist who just needed more time to be rediscovered while teaching Modern Literature at the local college. Joan had betrayed Bernard, Walt's mentor and idol, who'd talk about films and books and life as intellectual equals. Joan, the aspiring writer who was now gaining a publishable name for herself, clearly didn't need Bernard's proven genius anymore. Walt's mother, the whore. Disgusting.

As an example of experimental acting on film, this fairly low key independent offering from writer/director Noah Baumbach ('Mr. Jealousy' (1997)) seems to be on par with the likes of 'Dogville' (2004) while examining the life of a Manhattan family in crisis. Jesse Eisenberg ('The Village' (2004), 'Cursed' (2005)) gives a fairly decent performance throughout as intense egocentric teen Walt Berkman, dealing with the sudden separation of his parents Bernard (Jeff Daniels; 'Dumb & Dumber' (1994), 'Because of Winn-Dixie' (2005)) and Joan (Laura Linney; 'The Life of David Gale' (2003), 'Kinsey' (2004)). He's the central character, already in trouble by trying to live up to his failed novelist father's ideals, now disillusioned and venomous against his philandering mother while in mourning. In fact, pretty well all of the main cast members serve up impressive scenes of insightfully captivating interpretations of the dialogue throughout. The problem is, 'The Whale and The Squid' is clearly far too personal a cinematic catharsis for Baumbach - who reportedly based this screenplay on his own experiences - to capably tell in a way that a paying audience can easily tap into and stay with for this flick's entire eighty-eight minutes. Like a home movie on a slightly bigger scale, with actors portraying Baumbach's Mom and Dad, and him. Several moments seem crammed in for these actors to play with as exercises for the camera, and yet the whole movie feels as though far too many important story-telling bits were left out. So, you're basically left watching the mechanics and techniques of Method Acting used by Eisenberg, Daniels and Linney unfold in front of you on the big screen, without really being given an actual arc or plot to pull it all together cohesively or give you much of a reason to care. If you're like ninety-nine point nine percent of the general movie going public, you'll likely be relentlessly bored to tears waiting around for something to happen that never really does happen. Nobody really changes here. Nothing is really resolved. It's kind of like real life: Predictably dull, with a few anecdotal sparks. Even the actual ending is anticlimactic, just as you think that Walt might finally have a satisfying epiphany that makes your entire time spent hoping for that to occur seem worth the price of admission. Instead, the screen abruptly goes black and the credits roll. You're sent out into the mall or back to your own daily life, where far more intriguing stories are probably being played out every day. The point behind why this film was made during the course of years as schedules and funding permitted really does seem to be what I'd cited already. Personal catharsis. Nothing else. I imagine that this effort will be unearthed in five or ten years from now, if Eisenberg becomes a big star and fans want to look back at his earlier work, but I also suspect that this ain't going to be the one that anyone will want to be reminded of by then. Yawn.

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Syriana
REVIEWED 12/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

There was a problem. CIA field man in Beirut Bob Barnes (George Clooney) calmly walked away from the demolished car's charred crater haunted by what had gone wrong. He had delivered the two portable rocket launchers to the targeted weapons dealer as planned. The dealer's car had exploded on cue. But, the delivery had been split, and only one of the launchers had been destroyed along with Bob's underworld contact that day. The other American-made weapon had been taken by a blue-eyed Egyptian who spat broken Farsi from behind a loaded gun pointed at Barnes' face. This was a problem that nobody at Langley wanted to know about. The Middle East was hot right now, and the President's mandate was to continue encouraging the liberation of a post-Gulf War Iraq through US business deals securing and exporting oil. Iraq. Iran. Kazakhstan. The entire region of Syriana was up for grabs, and the delicacy of creative diplomacy was a major tact now. Junior Federal Trade Investigator Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) understood this midset, but his unenviable job was to look into the recent merger of two American oil conglomerates with stakes in the Syriana fields. The larger corporation, Connex, had lost its bid to set up shop in Kazakhstan to the smaller oil company Kileen, but then the two firms had merged, sending up a red flag in Bennett's Washington office. Had laws been broken? And, if so, how deep was the corruption? Who were the players? Sure, the US Senate wanted this merger to go through. Homeland reserves won't last forever. But the Connex-Kileen honeymoon also had to appear clean to the American people. Swiss-based American energy consultant Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) had been closely following the merger and how the Chinese were building strong ties in that desert landscape. His analyst company had been trying to get on side with the aged Emir of Iran for some time, and the opportunity for Woodman to impress that retiring royalty's eldest son and national reformist, Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig), was at hand. However, Nasir had already convinced his father to sign a lucrative oil contract with the Chinese, weakening America's presence in Iran. This was a problem. Barnes' memos about the missing rocket launcher had irked his superiors. He needed something to divert his attention. Another covert mission, on a need to know basis, for instance. The CIA had already labelled Nasir as a bad guy who's in collusion with the Communists, and both Connex-Kileen and the Senate had secretly made it clear that no tears would be shed if something like, say, Nasir's car suddenly blowing up, would pave the way for the Iranian Emir's pro-American younger son to take the throne instead.

Based on novelist Robert Baer's 2002 book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, this oftentimes excruciatingly complicated movie from writer/director Stephen Gaghan ('Abandon' (2002)) seems to forget about the paying audience that's both literally and figuratively sitting in the dark throughout its entire hundred and twenty-six minute length. Three predominantly character-driven stories are pretty well mashed together here as vaguely intriguing filler revolving around the possible corruption involving a merger of Connex and Kileen, two American oil companies with lucrative post Gulf War II business contracts in the Middle East. One story, in which Switzerland-based energy consultant Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon; 'Good Will Hunting' (1997), 'The Bourne Ultimatum' (2007)) is dragged into the fray through horrifying circumstance to become a close advisor to Iranian Emir-in-waiting Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig; 'Reign of Fire (2002), 'Kingdom of Heaven' (2005)) ends up going no where fast. Another thread sees burned out CIA field operative Bob Barnes (George Clooney; 'From Dusk Till Dawn' (1996), 'Ocean's Twelve' (2004)) pretty well existing merely in order to lend a certain amount of shadowy intrigue and unnecessary gore to the screenplay, and yet doesn't really amount to much come the closing credits. The main story, where Federal Washington junior investigator Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright; 'The Manchurian Candidate' (2004), 'Broken Flowers' (2005)) gets down to the nitty gritty of sifting through the details of this tumultuous merger, is continually shoved into the background as just one more surprisingly uninteresting layer, turning this entire experiment into an aggravating slog that's hardly worth the price of admission. Even if you get in for free, you'll probably want your money back. It's like watching paint dry. Really interesting-looking paint, applied by some of the best painters in the business, but you're still left wondering why you're sitting there watching it dry when you could be doing something more enjoyable, such as eating glass. Quite frankly, this enormously convoluted effort has all the potential to easily be as good as 'A Few Good Men' (1992) or 'The Pelican Brief' (1993), but Gaghan seems far more interested in turning this flick into a boring foreign affairs version of the comparably good yet coma inducing cinematic mess 'Crash' (2005), where none of what motivates any of these characters is given any lasting importance. The context doesn't matter. The possible scandals don't matter either. You're simply supposed to be awed by the performances while being led down a garden path for avid conspiracy theorists. It's one of those movies where, if you really need to impress your friends, simply say that it wasn't complicated at all. My brain hurt after sitting through it, and not in a good way. Sure, the acting is outstanding, but it's not enough when you're not given any tangible way to tap into the larger picture that's ineptly presented here. Nothing clearly fits together until the end. Two hours later. Few of the stories intersect until the last act - long after you've already given up trying to follow along or care anymore - where you're rewarded with one of the most forgettably disappointing endings seen in the movie theatre this year.

It's got a great cast, but 'Syriana' sure is a painfully lousy shell game.

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Spymate
REVIEWED 02/06, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Shades of 'Bedtime for Bonzo' (1951) and 'The Barefoot Executive' (1971) are clearly evident throughout in Vancouver co-writer/director Robert Vince's ('Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch (2002), 'MXP: Most Xtreme Primate' (2003)) fairly cheesy and yet imaginatively entertaining big screen 2003 spy spoof for kids, in which doting father and ex-Agency operative Mike Muggins (Toronto's Chris Potter; 'Arachnid' (2001), 'The Pacifier' (2005)) and his Project Spymate espionage partner turned Circus Boreal star attraction Minkey The Monkey (played by a chimpanzee named Louie) come out of their ten-year retirement in order to save Mike's award-winning, Oxygen-Iodide Chemical Laser inventing twelve year-old daughter Amelia (Emma Roberts; 'Blow' (2001), 'Aquamarine' (2006)) from the dastardly machinations of evil scientist Dr. Robert Farley (TV's 'Spin City' co-star Richard Kind; 'Bewitched' (2005)).

Sure, 'Spymate' does pretty well play out as an overtly affected, silly Saturday Morning small screen episode intended for little children. It's bloated with bizarre contrivances and ridiculously hammy peripheral caricatures who pull a steady stream of dumb faces for the camera. However, Vince's and Anna McRoberts' screenplay does click along at an impressive pace, and it's just plain fun watching Minkey be thrown into an exhaustive range of over-the-top stunts that include sword fighting in the Arabian Desert, Kung-Fu brawling opposite Pat Morita's mountain monastery Ninja leader Kiro Sensei - Morita's last role - and seeing this gadget geared, pint-sized simian evade goons and a wintry avalanche while snowboarding down Japan's "Mount Yarigatake". If that last bit seems like a swipe from 'xXx' (2002), don't be surprised. This eighty-four minute romp unabashedly borrows from a bunch of recognizable spy flicks, most notably tossing in cinematic nods to such James Bond classics as 'Dr. No' (1962), 'You Only Live Twice' (1967), 'The Spy Who Loved Me' (1977) and 'Octopussy' (1983). Even the primary thug (Hugo, played by Michael Bailey Smith) slightly resembles 007's hulking nemesis, Jaws.

Unfortunately, most of the supporting cast that's mainly cobbled together for a somewhat unimportant side story involving oddball circus performers penetrating Dr. Farley's dubiously guarded Montana estate are bewilderingly amateurish and do sabotage things for pretty well any moviegoer who's over the age of this many fingers. The outrageously terrible accents and mildly lazy continuity are aggravating, and why the landed kicks and punches make people here emit squeaky toy noises is anyone's guess. Pedantic kiddie comedy for cereal commercials comes to mind. At the same time - and reasons why it's actually still worth recommending - this production is great-looking, has a quality soundtrack and is full of delightful, softly comedic hairy knuckled adventure for Kindergartners who love action movies to stay tuned in from beginning to closing credits. The jet pack and X-ray glasses scenes are hilarious. 'Spymate' is apparently this crew's first theatrical leap, after releasing a trio of direct-to-video films starring a monkey either playing ice hockey in 'MVP: Most Valuable Primate' (2000), skate boarding in 'MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate' (2001) or surfing the slopes in 'MXP'. So, it'll be interesting to see what's in store if Minkey the highly trained secret agent reappears in an equally irreverent sequel to this over-all slick effort.

'King Kong' (2005) and 'Curious George' (2006) have absolutely nothing to worry about, but check out this purely frivolous Canadian curiosity as a predictably undemanding, goofy guilty pleasure rental for the entire family.

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The Shaggy Dog
REVIEWED 03/06, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Vaguely inspired by 'The Shaggy D.A.' (1976) and its predecessor 'The Shaggy Dog' (1959) - itself adapted from writer Felix Salten's 1930 novel, The Hound of Florence, and reportedly Disney Studios' first live action feature - this delightfully enjoyable, updated version has California Deputy District Attorney Dave Douglas (Tim Allen; 'Toy Story' (1995), 'Christmas with the Kranks' (2004)) forced into observing his mildly dysfunctional family from a canine perspective as a bizarrely transforming side effect, after he's bitten by a three hundred year-old Sheep Dog that's stolen from a Tibetan mountain village by nasty pharmaceutical science head Dr. Kozak (Robert Downey Jr.; 'U.S. Marshals' (1998), 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' (2005)) in order to harness that hairy mutt's genetic secret to eternal life.

An Old English Sheep Dog from Tibet? Yes, this one's premise makes absolutely no sense what so ever, but at least it doesn't rely on a magical amulet and a mouthful of what would now likely be considered Harry Potter-esque pseudo-Latin like the original black and white family favourite did. This incarnation of 'The Shaggy Dog' is actually a fun romp because it doesn't get too caught up with trying to intellectualize what's obviously wobbly pretext merely concocted so that a paying audience can see Tim Allen act like a big dope on the big screen. He doesn't disappoint. This ninety-eight minute soft comedy - that feels like it borrows more from the lycanthrope myth seen in such flicks as 'The Wolf-Man' (1941) and 'Teen Wolf' (1985) - definitely affords Allen an oftentimes hilarious cinematic playground within the notion of his character turning into and back from being an ordinary looking dog. All the same, there aren't any real Horror moments included in this feature. Some of the best scenes are when his pooch imitations send Douglas on funny little minor loops of obsessive behaviour that actual dog owners will immediately recognize and likely enjoy seeing spoofed here, such as him sleeping across the bed, chasing his tail-like belt in circles, being relentlessly sidetracked by new scents and sounds, as well as automatically mooching while somebody eats, and exhibiting a mindlessly explosive territorial streak to a neighbourhood hound.

Yes, it's silly, but in a good way. It's also great when Downey Jr. gets into the act in unexpected ways later on. Clearly, this cast had a blast with this first of what will probably become another crowd pleasing franchise for Allen and his co-stars Kristin Davis ('Blacktop' (2000), 'The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D' (2005)) as screen wife Rebecca, and Zena Grey ('Snow Day' (2000), 'In Good Company' (2004)) and Spencer Breslin ('The Santa Clause 2' (2002), 'Raising Helen' (2004)) as their kids Carly and Josh. Sure, director Brian Robbins ('Varsity Blues' (1999), 'The Perfect Score' (2004)) and the team of four screenwriters connected to this movie don't quite figure out an effectively seamless way of keeping Allen's dialogue from slipping into becoming a steady stream of overdubbed monologues that only you can hear as words (everyone else hears barking), and a few of those Dave the Dog clips become even weirder when he ends up translating the noises of all of the other animals around him for you in order to move the story and humour along, however I'd already mentioned that this one doesn't make a whole of sense. It still works as an entertaining time at the theatre for the entire family to be happily satisfied with, without having to think too hard. Nothing wrong with that, as it's done here.

Check it out this decidedly fluffy tale of clever anecdotal sight gags as a memorably goofy escape that's well worth the price of admission.

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