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Five TV Families to Avoid on Thanksgiving
by Scott Von Doviak
These clans will make you appreciate your own. /entertainment/
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My First Time
by You
"I remember the zip of the door, and our naked dash across the dark campground to his tent..."
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Things Drunk People Say
by Kathleen Go
"Get the duct tape. You have dropped your last beer."
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Culture Wars: Will James Cameron's Avatar live up to the hype?
by Andrew Osborne and Scott Von Doviak
Worthy successor to Aliens, or the world's most expensive Smurfs movie?
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Miss Information
by Erin Bradley
So many women, so few decision-making skills. /advice/
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Hosting Your Own Hedonistic Thanksgiving
by Ben Reininga
Drinking, smoking, and gorging with your friends: this can be the best holiday of the year.
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The Confessies
by You
The Robert Pattinson Award for Twilight Devotion
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Platinum Goddess
by Kim Weston
Forget gold: these women are striking in silver, and not much else.
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Mutual of Omaha
by Rachel Shukert
In my Jewish Nebraskan youth group, they taught more than Hebrew.
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Planet 51
by Scott Von Doviak
The premise is Pixar-caliber; the execution is strictly terrestrial. /entertainment/
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Sex Advice From . . . Dungeons and Dragons Players
by Eric Larnick
Q. What has D&D taught you about dating? A. Some days you're the knight, some days you're the dragon. /advice/
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Nerve Made Me Do It: New Moon Midnight Screening
by Jack Harrison
We send a professor of medieval literature to face 1,000 screaming Twilight fans.
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Everything I Know About Love I Learned From... Pedro Almodovar
by Phil Nugent
Five lessons on romance from Penelope Cruz's favorite director. /entertainment/
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Talking to Strangers
by Sean McGurn and Meghan Pleticha
Nerve asks deeply personal questions to people we just met.
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Awesome Advice, Way to Go!
by Erin Bradley
Always pepper your column with a healthy dose of slut-shaming. /advice/
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Celebrity Look-alikes
by Glenn Glasser
Who's that girl? We hit the streets to find famous doppelgangers.
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True Stories: Three-Year Drought
by Mia Agnello
Last time made me a mom. This time made me panic.
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Savage Love
by Dan Savage
Why do single women find married men such a turn-on? /advice/
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My First Time
by You
"We wandered around West Philly in the rain, looking for a good place..."
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Cinema Sutra: Pretty Woman
by Jack Harrison
Julia Roberts shows how to wake your sleeping lover. /advice/
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Five Reasons Werner Herzog is More Badass Than Chuck Norris
by Phil Nugent
This man once ate his own shoe. /entertainment/
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REVIEW: Seed of Chucky |
Countless filmmakers have attempted to refresh, revise and reinterpret the slasher flick, making tonal shifts from earnest to self-aware to spoof to earnest again. This makes the successful Seed of Chucky seem even more impressive. Simultaneously retro and innovative, it's destined to become a camp horror classic.
The plot is simple: In Glastonbury, England, an ugly animated doll named Shitface is living in servitude to a heavy-metal ventriloquist. Watching an Access Hollywood promo for a new Jennifer Tilly movie, he sees infamous killer dolls Chucky and Tiffany and sets out to find them in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Tilly, playing herself, is hoping to revive her career as a serious actress by winning the role of the Virgin Mary in rapper Redman's directorial debut, a re-telling of the birth of Jesus. Shitface locates his parents on the film set, is renamed Glen (or Glenda, for he is gender-neutral and conflicted, which becomes important later), and the dysfunctional family goes on a killing spree, hoping to impregnate Tilly and inhabit her body.
Awash in references to nearly every significant horror movie from Psycho to It's Alive, the film is a both an admiring tribute to its predecessors and a return to what made those films great: plot and character. As loopy as the story seems, the film adheres to its own inner logic. Jennifer Tilly's humorously self-aware autoportrait drives the plot forward as it becomes more fanciful and absurd. Yet the true stars of the movie are the dolls. Like Team America: World Police, Seed of Chucky is a landmark in the annals of puppet acting. Chucky, Tiffany, and Glen/Glenda are some of the most expressive actors in Hollywood, despite being made of plastic. — Andy Horwitz |
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REVIEW: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason |
 The first Bridget Jones movie was a trilling comic misadventure whose strengths far outweighed its weaknesses. All the actors have returned for this sequel, so why is it so lame? First, let's not go overboard: Edge is engaging and sweet, as funny as any good sitcom. Yet it comes off as a dim carbon copy of the original, without nearly enough wit, originality or Hugh Grant. Perhaps the problem lies in the source material: hoping to one-up the original, author Helen Fielding sent Bridget on all manner of wacky adventures (Thai prison, anyone?). But what's funny in a comic novel seems absurd onscreen, and director Beeban Kidron paints with far too broad a stroke, repeating gags like he's helming a Mike Myers film. By the time the whole sideshow rattles off the rails, the characters lose credibility and, with it, poignancy. Colin Firth is fine as the straight-laced Darcy, but it's hard not to miss the crackle of Hugh Grant's swaggering Daniel, who appears in the film too late to make much impact. Even Renée Zellweger, so brilliant in the original, becomes almost a caricature, a woman with all of Bridget's doofiness and none of her, well, edge. — Sarah Hepola |
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Date DVD #6: Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman |
 The obvious date rental this week is Richard Linklater's motormouth romance Before Sunset, a smarty-pants sequel to Before Sunrise, the 1995 film that cast Ethan Hawke as an American who meets Julie Delpy on a train somewhere in the middle of Europe. It's brilliantly edited, well-acted and heartbreaking if you buy into it (I did), but irritating and preening if you don't. In any case, the self-admiring, two-film love affair is as likely to turn off as many dates as it turns on.
Yes, picking the right highbrow date DVD is difficult. You don't want to dumb yourself down and pick up that reissue of Bridget Jones, but you don't want to rent the five-disc Fritz Lang Epic Collection either. Brilliant as Lang's Metropolis may be, it doesn't exactly inspire human connection. Our suggestion: ease into subtitle territory with Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman.
A blind samurai who travels the countryside working as a masseuse and a kind of vengeance killer, Zatoichi is a kind of folk hero in Japan, a Godzilla who doesn't have to be called on through those tiny fairies. In this new film, Takeshi Kitano reinvents the franchise as a kind of brash catch-all. He directs the film with a little something for everyone — slashing, lightning-quick fights, sly humor, wild costumes, slapstick, even a little middle-age heartbreak — and, most importantly, a pulsing energy that climaxes with one of the most ridiculously upbeat song-and-dance scenes I've ever seen. So tell your skeptical date that yes, this is an arty Japanese samurai film, but it's also a circus, an absurd comedy, a big, big show. The moral here: the right pretentious highbrow DVD has to slum it a little. — Logan Hill |
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©2004 Nerve.com.
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