War Dogs (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, War

Wardogs1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana De Armas, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Stephen Chin and Todd Phillips & Jason Smilovic, based on the ROLLING STONE article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Like The Big Short before it, Todd Phillips’s War Dogs is a breezy, loose, “for dummies” gloss on recent history that says for all the things you thought were going to hell in the world, you don’t know the fucking half of it, buddy. It details how W.’s administration, after being accused of cronyism in making Dick Cheney’s Haliburton wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of wealth with the gift of bid-free defense contracts, opened the floodgates by essentially giving every unscrupulous asshole on the planet the opportunity to bid on defense contracts. In that pursuit, our government set up an “eBay” list where major arms dealers could pick off the larger contracts, and dilettantes and arms “day-traders” could, from the comfort of their basements, sell the United States military a few thousand handguns. War Dogs adapts a magazine article about two assholes in particular, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who made a fortune, then made a terrible mistake when they decided to traffic a hundred million rounds of defective Chinese AK-47 ammo by disguising it as Albanian stock. Actually, their mistake is that Efraim is a psychotic loser so pathological in his incompetence that even the U.S. government had no choice but to do something about it. It’s a level of obviousness matched by the film in moments like one in the middle of the game where Efraim screams, “Fuck the American taxpayer!” OK, yes, we get it.

Rules Don’t Apply (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Rulesdontapply

*/****
starring Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Annette Bening
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna’s documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It’s been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production–his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don’t Apply, and it’s exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it’s an interesting one.

Vamp (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Vampire

Vamp1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, Grace Jones
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Wenk

by Bryant Frazer In concept a little bit After Hours and a little bit An American Werewolf in London, Vamp attempts to transplant some New York cool into a story set in the L.A. underground, where a downtown strip club is staffed by lithesome vampires who prey on losers and outsiders yearning for companionship in the lonesome city. Vamp isn’t scary, though it’s fairly stylish, thanks in large part to Grace Jones, who flew into Hollywood with an entourage (including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Richard Bernstein) to play Katrina, an exotic dancer with an appetite for flesh. While the film is pleasantly weird whenever she’s on screen, that’s not much of the time. The bulk of it is a laid-back assemblage of moderately clever ideas–a bunch of clockwork gears that never mesh into anything much.

Moana (2016)

Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Musical, Theatrical

Moana

**½/****
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|[The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Film Festivals, Romance, The Criterion Collection

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****/****
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis’s audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg’s sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here’s a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Cronenberg’s Spider, and Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

Fantasticbeasts

**/****
starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell
written by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw J.K. Rowling is more plotter than writer or editor, more rambling fantasist than disciplined storyteller–explanation there as to why her Harry Potter novels aren’t classics so much as very popular stories for children. This also explains why Rowling flinched at the prospect of Harry martyring himself at the end, something the entire series leads up to. Rowling betrays, too, heroine Hermione, the logical successor to Dumbledore’s seat, not wife to Harry’s drippy buddy. She didn’t have the heart, she says, to do the things she should have done, and so produced books you’ll grow out of. And quickly. The film adaptations (like Beethoven’s Symphonies, only the odd ones are good, and you should skip the first) are uneven largely because they’re best when the folks doing the adapting take Rowling’s ideas and craft narratives and narrative subtext from/for them–and worst when they try to pack in all those volumes of blandly discursive blather to please a massive fanbase. Asking Rowling herself to write the screenplay for David Yates’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (hereafter Fantastic Beasts), then, has yielded exactly the expected result: the film is bloated, boring at times, rambling most others; and it’s rich with genuine ideas and an honest-to-goodness progressive heartbeat. It’s topical, boasts of an extremely able cast it squanders mostly, and acts as a glossy coat sheening over the “real” story, pulsing but drowned, at its centre.

Finding Dory (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Pixar

Findingdory1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is, in fact, a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

ICYMI (11/11/16)

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
Apologies for the radio silence this week. Honestly? No will. We have plenty of stuff on the horizon, though, and in the meantime here are links to our festival reviews of Arrival and Elle, which open in theatres today.

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, War

Hacksawridge

***/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey, Vince Vaughn
screenplay by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight
directed by Mel Gibson

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson are our two most prominent plainly and explicitly Catholic directors. Because Scorsese is the kind of Catholic he is, his films are about questioning faith. Because Mel Gibson is insane, his films aren’t. As a result of that, and somewhat unexpectedly, Gibson is the single best case for the auteur theory working in the United States. As the originator and chief benefactor of The Passion of the Christ (the best and worst film of 2004), he can officially make whatever movie he wants, and with Hacksaw Ridge (and Apocalypto before that) he’s gone ahead and done just that. Mel Gibson is the single best case for a lot of things. In Hacksaw Ridge, he tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a troubled, severely abused young Virginian who enlists in WWII as a conscientious objector, refusing to touch a gun, dedicating himself to saving folks as a combat medic. It’s essentially a superhero origin story opening the same weekend as another (Dr. Strange)–both films dealing with faith and the consequences of betraying said faith. In Dr. Strange, directed by openly Christian Scott Derrickson, bargaining with morality results in dreadful and unforeseen consequences. In Hacksaw Ridge, because Gibson’s religious fervour burns so bright and erratic, all such niceties and ambiguity burn away in allegorical hellfire and literal rains of blood. He’s long threatened a sequel to Passion. Here, he’s delivered one.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD

Legoftarzan1

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the “Tarzan” stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates’s The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams’s time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium’s abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it’s an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it’s more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It’s not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the “good” bits. I also don’t love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom–at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn’t really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he’s found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture’s release. In other words, I’m a big, giant pulp nerd.

Blood Diner (1987) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

Blooddiner1

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B+
starring Rick Burks, Carl Crew, Roger Dauer, LaNette La France
written by Michael Sonye
directed by Jackie Kong

by Bryant Frazer So bad it’s good? I wouldn’t go that far. But Blood Diner is definitely something–a no-frills pastiche of 1950s disembodied-brain sci-fi potboiler, 1960s Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie, 1970s cannibal-cuisine flick, and early-1980s buddy-cop movie. I’m tempted to say it stitches together a Frankenstein’s patchwork of genre movies because it has no vision of its own, but that’s too glib. If nothing else, 20-something Asian-American director Jackie Kong (Night Patrol) loves L.A.: she wrapped all of those genre influences around a love letter to the city’s underground music scene circa 1987, casting punk rockers and rockabilly singers as extras, bit players, and movie stars in a story about a pair of pretty-boy sibling serial killers who run a popular foodie destination on Hollywood Boulevard where the vegetarian dishes are, unbeknownst to patrons, boosted by the presence of human flesh in the recipe.

Lights Out (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

Lightsout1

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Maria Bello
screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the short film by David F. Sandberg
directed by David F. Sandberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. This year’s Brian Helgeland Award, named in honour of the man who wrote the Oscar- and Golden Raspberry-winning L.A. Confidential and The Postman, respectively, in the same year, goes to Eric Heisserer, who has somehow written one of the year’s best movies about motherhood, Arrival, and one of its worst, Lights Out. Lights Out is not a good movie about anything, really (save perhaps the value of crank flashlights); as with the Heisserer-penned remakes of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lights Out screenplay is joylessly aspirational in the way of a personal assistant doing menial chores to accumulate credit–the thankless task in this case adapting David F. Sandberg’s simple but effective micro-short of the same name. That director Sandberg opted not to write it himself implies the short was intended as a calling-card rather than a proof-of-concept, and his direction of the feature hardly evolves its meat-and-potatoes style. He created a monster and now he’s riding its coattails; what Lights Out desperately needs is someone with a vision for the film, not just a career.

Chopping Mall (1986) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Choppingmall2

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Kelli Maroney, Tony O’Dell, John Terlesky, Dick Miller
written by Jim Wynorski & Steve Mitchell
directed by Jim Wynorski

by Bryant Frazer Chopping Mall is not the shopping-centre slasher movie its title suggests. Here’s what you really need to know: It includes a scene where a woman clad in light-blue Playboy panties runs screaming through the spacious halls of the Sherman Oaks Galleria in a hail of laser fire, chased by a killer robot resembling a cross between a Dalek from “Doctor Who” and Number Five from Short Circuit. The opening sequence features Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov in a cameo as their Paul and Mary Bland characters from the cult classic Eating Raoul. The always-game Barbara Crampton, who had just shot Re-Animator, takes her top off. And, like the maraschino cherry on top of a soft-serve strawberry sundae, the great character actor Dick Miller plays a crusty janitor who trash-talks one of the malevolent tin-can tyrants like a Jet giving the finger to Officer Krupke.

Swiss Army Man (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

Swiss Army Man (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Zombie

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

Ouija2

***½/****
starring Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas
written by Mike Flanagan & Jeff Howard
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Because distribution is the ridiculous trash fire it is sometimes, Mike Flanagan, through circumstance, misadventure, and good old-fashioned industriousness, had three films ready for release in 2016: Hush, Before I Wake, and Ouija: Origin of Evil (hereafter Ouija 2). I’ve only seen Hush and Ouija 2 thus far–it looks like Before I Wake has been delayed yet again–but I can say that when taken with his first two films, the moody Absentia and the excellent Oculus, Flanagan is already at the forefront of the new American horror revolution. His movies are drum-tight. He isn’t afraid of the high-concept. He makes smart use of minimal exposition and narrative ellipsis, and he embraces the inexplicable and the uncanny. Better, there is at work in Flanagan’s pictures this undercurrent of grief, tied together with the thought that perhaps these intimations of immortality are bound snug with the dementing tortures of unimaginable loss. The supernatural is mainly considered, after all, upon the death of loved ones, and so it is that Ouija 2‘s Alice (Elizabeth Reaser) makes a living with her two young daughters, Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson), as a fake spirit medium giving succour to the recently bereaved.

London Has Fallen (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo

Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Bulgaria, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

Londonhasfallen1

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Creighton Rothenberger & Katrin Benedikt and Christian Gudegast and Chad St. John
directed by Babak Najafi

by Walter Chaw It’s a corker. Playing exactly like another instalment in the “Call of Duty” FPS videogame franchise, Iranian-born Babak Najafi’s London Has Fallen is a gobsmacking, jingoistic, political exploitation horror-thriller that traffics in contemporary paranoia with unusually exuberant brutality. It loves killing people. Loves it. The picture’s packed full of xenophobia and all the other insidious forms of fear infecting our modern apocalypse: hatred of the Other, terror of invasion, terror of the self. It fashions what is essentially another 28 Days Later sequel by recasting the rage zombies as Islamic Fundamentalists, simultaneously creating in the process a recruitment video for bellicose young men in the West wanting to kill Arabs–and one for bellicose young men in the Middle East wanting to kill Americans. Tidy. London Has Fallen is propaganda with a budget, a few recognizable faces, and some directing chops to boot. I’m equally glad and appalled it exists. I wish I were more surprised that it does.

The Immortal Story (1968) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1960s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Orson Welles, Drama, Esoterica, France, Television, The Criterion Collection

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Histoire immortelle
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Orson Welles
written by Orson Welles, from a short story by Karen Blixen
directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer It’s one of those salutary coincidences of movie history that the final narrative film completed by Orson Welles would turn out to be this rumination on an old man’s obsession with storytelling. It’s not that Welles was exactly elderly at the time (he was 51 when he made it), but there’s a matter-of-fact finality to the work that becomes just a touch spooky in retrospect. Commissioned by the French national television agency as a Jeanne Moreau vehicle to commemorate the transition to colour television, The Immortal Story required that Welles work in colour for the first time, catalyzing a fairly dramatic evolution of his style. But it gave him the opportunity to adapt a short story by Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), one of his favourite writers, and to work again with Moreau, one of his favourite actors. Less than an hour long, it has remained an obscure film for a variety of reasons, but it’s intermittently remarkable despite its modesty.

Scarecrows (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Zombie

Scarecrows1

*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Ted Vernon, Michael Simms, Victoria Christian, Richard Vidan
written by Richard Jefferies and William Wesley
directed by William Wesley

by Walter Chaw Terrible in that plucky way that earnest shoestring products can be terrible, William Wesley’s Scarecrows has a few memorable gore moments and a lot of bad dialogue, execrable performances, and senseless exposition. I saw this movie on VHS in high school as part of my weekend ritual of renting a shelf and staying up all night shotgunning the dregs. This led to a few remarkable discoveries, of course–and it led to discoveries like this as well. The hook of Scarecrows is a strong one, taking the somehow underutilized image of the scarecrow in the horror genre and making a grand bogey of it, but the result is essentially a zombie-cum-spam-in-a-cabin flick featuring a paramilitary group fresh off a heist engaged in a supernatural backcountry rigmarole. Still, the film’s greatest crime isn’t a bad premise but that it’s boring. Really boring. Mainly it’s boring because every character acts like an idiot at all times, making it hard to muster much in the way of stakes. That’s also why Scarecrows isn’t scary or tense, and because I think it wasn’t long enough and they ran out of money, there are tons of filler close-ups of scarecrows just sort of, you know, hanging there. Kuleshov or something.

Café Society (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2016, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Cafesociety1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can’t seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015’s Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen’s nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker’s aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen’s old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren’t the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully lensed and defiantly dumb, it’s another testament to Allen’s surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Short Films

Posted in2016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Ff16shorts

Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.