Welcome back to me, America! Roland McShyster here, after the hiatus to end all hiatuses… hiati… hiya-hyacinth… uh, all multiples of hiatus! I’m back and on the attack, feeling refreshed after six weeks of boxin’ and detoxin’, as the saying goes. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my good friend Orson Welch for filling my incredibly snazzy shoes while I was out, I’m sure he did a fine job and should I ever have a reason to read the columns he did while I was gone, that’ll just confirm it. Keep your eyes peeled, we may just be bringing that young go-getter back for a guest spot the next time I go on vacation or lose the will to live. From the looks of my office he certainly generated more than his share of reader correspondence and acid-filled mail bombs. Kinda makes me feel like that guy Robin Williams played on Good Morning America to tell you the truth, and I thank you for that. Back by popular demand! But enough with the self-congratulatory bullshit, what say we get on to the movies?

In Theaters

Duplex
Somewhere out in Hollywood there’s a giant magic 8-ball that’s spitting out movie concepts, and I think they’ve forgotten how to shake the thing. In Duplex, a modern-day cross between Panic Room and Phone Booth, an engaged couple agrees to live inside a hollowed-out Xerox machine for one month as part of a radio station stunt, and the winner gets to keep the Xerox machine. Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore star as a couple who dreams of a brighter future where they won’t have to go down to Kinkos every time they need to copy a tax form or ransom note. The result is like My Dinner with Andre minus Andre the Giant’s witty banter, and saying the movie makes you never want to live inside a copy machine with another person for a month is putting it mildly. There is a lot of potential for groundbreaking B.O. humor in the premise, but in a film where even the sex scenes are implausible, you have to take the whole thing with a big enough grain of salt to choke a salt donkey.

Out of Time
Now here we go with a prime example of the Hollywood’s latest trend du jour: adapting popular albums into movies. So far the results of this experimental genre have been mixed at best, and any genre that was inaugurated by 1972’s sterilizingly bad Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has a lot of apologizing to do right out of the gate. But after the disappointing R.E.M./Neil Young joint project Monster’s Ball in 2001, I’m surprised to say this film actually does justice to the hit R.E.M. album from 1991. My favorite chapter in the story is “Losing My Religion,” where Denzel Washington plays a priest trying to figure out what to do with this naked guy who got shot by an arrow. What does it mean? Nobody knows, but it’s funny because Denzel swears a lot.

School of Rock
When I heard that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was making his move to become a mainstream movie star, my first thought was: “Good luck, Jack Black couldn’t even make that guy likeable!” Well, as usual, Hollywood set out to prove me wrong, and also as usual, Hollywood dropped the bong again. Don’t get me wrong, Black is his usual spunky self as the math geek genius who is paid by the Rock’s parents to tutor him with extreme prejudice, so that the Rock can get his G.E.D. and take over the family’s fat rendering business. But it would take Marlon Brando to convince an audience that this meathead could pass a pregnancy test, let alone calculus, and this credibility gap exposes the film for what it really is: XXX without the action, skanks, guns or snappy grunted banter.

Shit Creek Manor
One word of advice to the unobservant: If you’re going to buy somebody’s creepy old haunted house and fix it up by candlelight at night, just don’t. But if you decide to do it anyway, at least make sure it doesn’t have some ironic name like Shit Creek Manor, because when the shit starts going down and you’re running for your life from killer furniture or whatever, the irony is really going to piss you off, trust me. Second piece of advice for the film’s producers: if the audience at the test screening is yelling “You gonna die, bitch!” when your heroine is in trouble and they boo when she gets out with only an involuntary hysterectomy, you just might have a turkey on your hands.

Wonderland
Val Kilmer is hilarious as the Mad Hatter in this, the lucky 10,000th adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic. I don’t know if they won a deluxe shopping spree or anything for being the 10,000th crew to make Carroll’s book into a movie, but I hope they did. Lisa Kudrow was born to play Alice, a ditzy hippie chick from the Bay Area who follows a giant rat down a storm sewer and then has to play croquet with this scary-assed sewer clown. Great to see they finally got the facts right and played this one so close to the book, unlike the animated Disney version that sugar-coated Carroll’s dark vision. Look out for Christina Applegate in a spot-on cameo as the sexy Cheshire Cat, and Cheech Marin chews up the screen as the burnout caterpillar who keeps insisting that “Alice isn’t here, man!”

And that’s the that that was this week, America. Hope you enjoyed it and would slap down a debutante to get more, because that’s what we’ll be doing next issue. See you then!

September 15, 2003
Cabin Fever, Matchstick Men, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Secondhand Lions, Underworld

September 1, 2003
The Backyard, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, Jeepers Creepers 2, The Order, Party Monster

August 18, 2003
American Splendor, Freddy vs. Jason, Grind, Open Range, Shaolin Soccer, Uptown Girls

July 21, 2003
Bed Boys II, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Rock the Cradle of Love, Seabiscuit, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over

July 7, 2003
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, Pirates of the Caribbean The Ride The Movie: The Curse of the Black Pearl Harbor, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Sequel, Terminator 3: Rise of the Meatheads

June 23, 2003
28 Days Later, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Jet Lag, When Harry Met Lloyd: Dumb and Dumberer

June 9, 2003
2 Fast 2 Furious, Daniel Day-Car, Hollywood Homicide, The In-Laws, The Italian Job, Love the Hard Way, Rugrats Gone Wild

May 26, 2003
The Matrix Rebooted, Finding Remo, Bruised Almighty, The Hoke, Downey with Love

May 12, 2003
The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Owning Mahowny, The Real Cancun, Whale Rider, X2: X-Men United

April 28, 2003
Anger Management, Bulletproof Monkey, Holes, House of 1000 Islands, Identity

April 14, 2003
Bend it Like Beck’s Ham, The Core, Head of State, A Man Apartment, Phone Booth

March 31, 2003
Ass! Ass! National Tango!, Bringing Down the House, Dreamcatcher, The Hunted, Piglet’s Big Movement, Tears of the Sun, Willard

2003 Oscars Special!
Oscar fever is upon us, ladies and gentlemen, and fear not: that puss-like discharge is a completely normal symptom.

March 3, 2003
Dark Blue, Old School, Spider, Studyhall Junkies, The Time-Life Christmas of David Gale

February 17, 2003
Cherdevil, How to Lose a Gut in 10 Days, The Jungle Book 2