2017 Archives - Page 4 of 8 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’17: Euthanizer

September 7, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Finland, TIFF

Armomurhaaja **½/**** written and directed by Teemu Nikki by Bill Chambers Veijo (Matti Onnismaa) kills pets for people who can't afford to have them euthanized by a vet: Gas for the small ones, a bullet for the larger varieties. He feigns a mystical connection with animals to exact a steep price, though, shaming owners for being the potential cause of their furry friend's misery, like the young woman he chides for keeping her cat locked up in a tiny apartment. This doesn't stop some of his clients from using him as a glorified hitman, and when his dying father's nurse…

Telluride ’17: The Shape of Water

September 6, 20172017, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017, Thriller

***/****
starring Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I watched Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water in a packed auditorium in Telluride, CO as a torrential rainstorm pounded the roof of what is, outside of the festival, an ice-skating rink, perched there with a park in front of it, the headwaters of the San Miguel to one side and the mountains to the other and all around. As the main character, cleaning lady Eliza (Sally Hawkins), turned on water for her bath, the cascading cacophony in the theatre joined in with a warm insularity I always equate with the Mandarin term for "cozy": two words that mean, or at least sound like they mean, "warm" and "noisy." The Shape of Water is like that, too, a gothic romance in the new del Toro style (after Crimson Peak, which, for me, was more noisy than warm, but mileage varies), which del Toro introduced as the evocation of a fantasy he had as a child upon watching Creature from the Black Lagoon in which the Creature falls in love with the girl and they live happily ever after. That's it, and were that truly it, The Shape of Water would be an instant classic rather than an acquired taste, perhaps–a future cult classic, certainly, that is forgiven for its odd digressions while justly-celebrated for its audacity. It's a triumph when it focuses in on the essential loneliness of misfits (the melancholic, Romanticist engine that drives del Toro's Hellboy movies), but in a subplot involving Russian spies, it becomes for long minutes time spent away from what works in favour of time spent with what doesn't. When del Toro has allowed intrusions like this in the past (see: his early masterpieces The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth), it's been up to us to infer the connection between his dark fables and his political concerns. Here he brings the subtext into text at a cost to the "warm/noisy" coziness of his work. For del Toro, insularity is a strength.

Telluride ’17: Battle of the Sexes

September 5, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2017

½*/****
starring Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman
written by Simon Beaufoy
directed by Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton

by Walter Chaw A movie that will make no one uncomfortable while reassuring the most blinkered that they’ve given at the office, Battle of the Sexes could be directed by anyone, star anyone, and it would still be exactly the same edgeless, meaningless, obsequious, instantly-obsolete artifact, desperate to be loved, expecting to be feted come awards season. It’s the casserole recipe that won in 1950, and Emma Stone continues her terrifying run as Audrey Hepburn’s career by ticking off her Children’s Hour/LGBTQ-sensitivity check-box. Stone’s blank, not “effortless” but rather “not trying” and “under-written” performance, is essentially a black wig, glasses, and a half-open pucker. Her Billie Jean King is a cipher who mouths platitudes about “equality” when what she really means is that she’s a vacuous narcissist who steamrolls everyone trying to help her in a movie that is, in fact, as woman-hating as the men it sets up as straw…well, men. To be clear, Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in an exhibition match does not mean that women and men are “equal.” It doesn’t mean they’re unequal, either. It actually means nothing. Indeed, that King, at the age of 29, in peak condition and at the pinnacle of her profession and training hard, beat a 55-year-old former world champion whom the film takes pains to reassure is not only not training, but also drinking and womanizing and popping mysterious pills while doing a full-blitz promotional campaign (he played the entire first set in a branded windbreaker), says the opposite, I think, of the intended message. Understand that at this point in the sport, in 2017, it’s not controversial that women and men do not compete at the same level. You’re getting mad, I can tell. This is Serena Williams, the undisputedly greatest woman tennis player in the history of the sport, in 2013 on “Late Night with David Letterman”:

Telluride ’17: downsizing

September 3, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Satire, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2017, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Hong Chau, Christoph Waltz
written by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Imagine if Tracy Flick, the energetic, demonic high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s brilliant Election, were a Vietnamese exchange student, heavily and hilariously accented. That’s one of the things wrong with Payne’s excruciating downsizing, a film that takes his now-trademark twee misanthropy and mashes it up against this pretense of Swiftian social satire that sets the Sisyphus-like struggle of the bedraggled Everyman against a fatalistic backdrop of environmental apocalypse. It’s a broad discourse on a lot of things: poverty and the failure of capitalism; the United States tearing itself apart along arbitrary class distinctions politicized into dramas of dominance and oppression. It’s also about a filmmaker using science-fiction as a cudgel, swinging it about as disrespectfully as he does extreme racial caricaturing and destined to hold it up as a shield when whatever opposition comes rolling in to protest a film that mainstream publications out of Venice are already proclaiming some kind of contemporary masterpiece. It’s like George Lucas all over again, but imagine if it were like Charlie Kaufman instead. For me, when you have an Asian character as problematic as Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a figure set up as both an object of derision and a holy relic, everything else is drowned out in that noise.

Check – Telluride 2017 Intro

September 2, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2017

by Walter Chaw

Things to do in Telluride:

Go to the thrift store on the main street. There’s always something there–old festival gear, glass-framed posters, sweatshirts (because it’s never not colder here than you expect it to be). Especially go there at night after the trams stop running and you’re walking in the pitch black on the side of a mountain. I’ve done this without a flashlight and with a dead cell phone and it’s terrifying. Also, there’s no air. Also, there are bears.

Alien: Covenant (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

August 31, 20172017, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bryant Frazer It’s rare that a perfect film is also financially lucrative. Ridley Scott’s Alien is one such title–a scary movie that really cuts across demographic boundaries. Think of it as a science-fiction slasher flick or a deep-space old-dark-house thriller with a crew of likeably blue-collar mopes facing off against a shape-changing menace that’s part axe murderer, part wild grizzly, and part serial rapist. It works because it’s non-specific. But in the space of its 117 minutes, it finds what frightens you. Alien stands as a singular achievement. Still, because it was released in the age of the sequel, studio 20^th Century Fox eagerly founded a franchise on it, and the series immediately began deconstructing itself. James Cameron’s Aliens was downright reactionary, replacing the first film’s working-class heroes with a bunch of Heinlein-esque space marines, transforming its boogeyman into an opposing army of boogeymen, and saddling Ripley with motherly duties, blithely undoing Alien‘s celebrated subversion of such tropes. In Alien³, the game was truly on: Director David Fincher straight-up murdered Ripley’s new nuclear family before powering the film’s narrative towards a climactic conflagration depicting a Christ-like sacrifice and unalloyed abortion metaphor. This was much more in keeping with the subtextually rich original–but it was decidedly audience-unfriendly. It took another five years for Joss Whedon and Jean-Pierre Jeunet to stick a fork in the franchise; Alien: Resurrection was the first Alien movie that genuinely didn’t seem to give a shit about Alien movies.

What Happened to Monday (2017) – Netflix

August 18, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, France, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

Seven Sisters
**½/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close, Pål Sverre Hagen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Alice Stoehr The bad news manifests itself in a flurry of stock footage and newscasters' voices. "Too many people, not enough food," declares one near-future pundit. "It is the biggest crisis in human history," adds another. Dr. Nicolette Cayman, a politician so Thatcher-esque that Glenn Close plays her in pearls and a navy blue suit, helps Europe's now-federalized government institute a strict one-child policy. Her Gestapo-like Child Allocation Bureau (or "CAB") patrols city streets, threatening hidden siblings with indefinite cryogenic stasis. So far, so familiar. It's much like Soylent Green or Children of Men or any of a dozen other dystopian thrillers. But What Happened to Monday's knotty premise continues: What if, say, seven identical sisters grew up in this political climate? They could each leave the house exactly one day a week, each time assuming the same collective identity. And what if one of these sisters, while out and about, happened to disappear?

Logan Lucky (2017)

August 17, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig
written by Rebecca Blunt
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Steven Soderbergh returns from a self-imposed retirement of all of four years with Logan Lucky, a heist movie so steeped in its maker’s creative and commercial history that it casually makes time in its climactic moments for a newscaster to dub its working-class heroes’ shenanigans “Ocean’s 7/11.” Begging to be read as an unnecessary but enjoyable victory lap from a filmmaker who hasn’t gone away so much as temporarily opted out of the rat race of alternating between formalist exercises, crowd-pleasers, and prestige pictures, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh working in his most amiable register–and for the most part doffing his aesthetic predilection for piss-yellow lighting–while still cycling through his pet interests of late. A polymath by nature, as evidenced by his annual viewing logs, Soderbergh more or less successfully wields Logan Lucky into a charming sampler platter of his tastes, from hitting genre story beats faithfully to realizing the smallest procedural details and celebrating sincere Americana while bemoaning its toxic corporatization.

Detroit (2017)

August 10, 20172017, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie
written by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Alex Jackson Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is painfully afraid of controversy. It’s as though Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were given the assignment to make a film about the 1967 Algiers Motel incident and cringed their way through it, trying their best to alienate neither black nor white audiences. Hilariously, the end result has now become one of the most controversial films of the year. An essay by Jeanne Theoharis, Say Burgin, and Mary Phillips (a trio of academics in political science, history, and African American studies, respectively) recently published on the HUFFINGTON POST denounced it as “the most irresponsible and dangerous movie of the year.” Angelica Jade Bastien of ROGEREBERT.COM states that she left the theatre in tears, not because of the violence so much as the “emptiness” behind the violence. And, of course, Armond White had to get his licks in, concluding, “Watching black people being brutalized seems to satisfy some warped liberal need to feel sorry.” Looks like I was wrong! Black film critics, at least, seem to fucking hate this movie.

The Dark Tower (2017)

August 6, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, Western

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King’s revered Dark Tower series, I’d probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence’s Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-’90s–the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”, Jamie Delano’s “Animal Man”, Grant Morrison’s “Doom Patrol”, and Delano/Garth Ennis’s “Hellblazer”, which of course formed the basis for Lawrence’s picture. But I don’t. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn’t jibe with images and rhythms I’d conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should’ve cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he’s been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won’t you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake’s parents’ kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he’s from, there’s no chicken.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

July 30, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones
screenplay Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, written by Antony Johnson and illustrated by Sam Hart
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Essentially No Way Out with less hot sex but better action sequences, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde is a lot of truly dreary Cold War spy intrigue interrupted periodically, but not often enough, by the good stuff. It proposes the antiquated notion that collusion with the Russians is treason in having heroic MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron–Mr. F after all, all this time) take ice baths and try to figure out who mysterious mole "Satchel" is in the last days of East Berlin. Her contact there is skeezy Percival (James McAvoy) whose handlers fear has gone a bit "feral" in the field. We're introduced to him trading Jim Beam and blue jeans for information and waking up with two girls (two!) to pick up Lorraine at the airport. There's also a French spy named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) who offers up a Sapphic love interest for Lorraine and ends up the way that lovers end up in spy movies. Leitch, an uncredited co-director on John Wick, brings the same style of kinetic, close-in martial arts and, eventually, gunplay of that film, but missteps badly by, among other things, making this about more than avenging a dead dog. Without an emotional charge–and there isn't enough of one generated by the loss of two of Lorraine's lovers–there's no real sense of emotion or energy in the action scenes. They're super cool, don't get me wrong (at least they are until Leitch decides at the very end to overuse slow motion), but they lack motivation and investment. But that's the least of Atomic Blonde's problems.

Madhouse (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

July 27, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

There Was a Little Girl
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Trish Everly, Michael Macrae, Dennis Robertson, Morgan Hart
screenplay by Stephen Blakley, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Shepherd and Robert Gandus
directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis

by Sydney Wegner The final frames of Madhouse are a title card with a George Bernard Shaw quote: “…life differs from the play only in this…it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.” In that instant, in one of the most beautifully-executed “middle-finger to my haters” moves in cinema, criticism of Ovidio G. Assonitis’s 1981 clusterfuck is rendered irrelevant. Sneaking that in at the end rather than putting it at the beginning is doubly hilarious, as you’ve just spent an hour-and-a-half trying to grasp onto this ungraspable thing, only to have all your hard work flushed away in a second. If your movie doesn’t make sense, it’s because living doesn’t make sense; case closed. Our own plots are never resolved, people flit in and out of our lives without us ever truly knowing them, our familial relationships are tangled and it’s sometimes impossible to figure out where any animosity began. We think we understand people, but it’s rare that we truly do.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 24, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mystery, New Zealand, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

July 22, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer
written for the screen and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw Effortlessly, almost guilelessly sexist in the way that only a 12-year-old with lacklustre breeding can be, Luc Besson’s latest opus of antsy expressionism, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (hereafter Valerian), is so relentlessly puerile, so unapologetically awful, that there’s absolutely no chance it won’t become a midnight masterpiece. Not one of the good ones, like Besson’s own The Fifth Element or The Professional (or The Messenger, curiously the most historically accurate Joan of Arc film), but one of the ones that are the feature-length equivalent of that repetitive noise your 9-year-old son makes when you’re driving him to a friend’s house. It’s an interminable adaptation of the Ruby Rhod sequence from The Fifth Element, an endurance test of unusual cruelty and imagination. If you’re sensing some grudging admiration for it, you’re not wrong. It’s like going to a torture museum and marvelling at the level of invention and craftsmanship dedicated to the methods to which humans go to discomfit one another. Some of that sadistic shit is worth millions–priceless, even.

Dunkirk (2017)

July 21, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, France, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I’m a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don’t like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there’s a real heart in there. It’s a bad science-fiction movie, but it’s a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it’s puffed-up full of itself, and it’s about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It’s going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It’s like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Outfest LA ’17: Something Like Summer

July 18, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance

*½/****
starring Grant Davis, Davi Santos, Ben Baur, Ajiona Alexus
screenplay by Carlos Pedraza, based on the novel by Jay Bell
directed by David Berry

by Alice Stoehr Musicals bloom from effusive emotion. When Catherine Deneuve strolled down the streets of Cherbourg, when Judy Garland hopped on a St. Louis trolley, their yearnings were too intense to merely be spoken. They had to be sung. In Something Like Summer, newcomer Grant Davis stars as Ben Bentley, a Texan teen and aspiring singer who’s heartsick (like Deneuve and Garland) over a boy. But his sweetheart Tim, played by Davi Santos, is a “good-looking jock,” as Ben puts it–closeted, Catholic, and deeply ashamed. After a few sub-rosa liaisons, the two bitterly part ways. The film cuts to a dim, empty theatre, where Ben sublimates his sorrows into a cover of the break-up song “Barely Breathing”: “I know what you’re doing,” he warbles. “I see it all too clear.” While Deneuve had Jacques Demy and Garland had Vincente Minnelli, Davis has first-time director David Berry, who stages the handful of musical numbers with minimal panache. No dancing, some haphazard camera movement, the actor emoting on a stage. Later, handheld close-ups will peer at Davis during his halting rendition of “La Vie en rose.” (He sings it in a Parisian café, the Eiffel Tower shining through a nearby window.) The soundtrack includes a couple of new compositions alongside songs originally by Regina Spektor and Ne-Yo, many of them intercut with bland montage, none of their lyrics especially salient to the story. Cohesion and spectacle both receive low priority versus the endless reams of plot.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

July 15, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Amiah Miller
written by Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw There are two problems that plague War for the Planet of the Apes. The first is that this far along into a franchise, it becomes a real burden to deal with the lore of eight (is it eight?) previous instalments; the second is that Rise… and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, this sequel’s two immediate predecessors, are so subtle and intelligent that there’s a real danger now of being too “on the nose” in trying to keep up with them. That co-writer/director Matt Reeves is able to wrangle both tigers to the extent that he does speaks to his skill. That he’s not able to entirely avoid a mauling speaks to the near-impossibility of the task. What was before an elegant parable of race and tribalism, dehumanization and Turing empathy tests, is now well and truly a blockbuster franchise product. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s obvious, transitioning from a very fine, elegiac western like a late Ford or an any-time Anthony Mann into, by the end, first a broad and winking take on Apocalypse Now, then a carefully-narrated Moses allegory. Consider a moment where the ersatz Kurtz, The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), speaks to our chimp hero Caesar (a motion-captured Andy Serkis) about the cost of vengeance and the sacrifices made during war that allow him to paint himself as Abraham even as he transitions into Pharaoh. Everyone’s fantastic in the scene; the problem is that its expository payload is mainly meant to set up the Charlton Heston film that started it all. Too, it confuses the characters of its parables in such a way as to suggest, uncomfortably, a connection between Jews and their persecutors, and a concentration camp/Egyptian slave narrative involving the persecution of apes for cheap labour only adds to the confusion. Oh, also, they’re building a wall that Caesar calls “madness” that will solve nothing.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

July 7, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr.
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Jon Watts & Christopher Ford and Chris McKenna & Eric Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw A painfully adequate entry in the ever-expanding MCU, Spider-Man: Homecoming has the benefit of a brilliant young lead in Tom Holland and a fantastically-layered villain turn by Michael Keaton, but it bears the burden of all the films that came before it and all those yet to come. There’s a lot of checking-off of boxes, in other words, with Homecoming reminding most of Ant-Man in that there seems to be a good standalone movie in here somewhere that keeps getting diverted into looking backwards and forwards. There was an episode of “St. Elsewhere” where a patient believed himself to be Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. Midway through, he spots Betty White, who had a recurring role on “St. Elsewhere”, and calls out “Sue Ann!,” the name of her character on “Mary Tyler Moore”. Both programs were produced by MTM, by the way, the company founded by Moore and ex-husband Grant Tinker. To enjoy that episode of the show completely would require knowledge of the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its production company. It’s a living example of the concept of post-modernism: a product based on nothing but itself and reliant entirely on the insular knowledge of a small group of fetishists. Such is the fire in which fandom is born, and Spider-Man: Homecoming is the natural product of that: an origin story that doesn’t provide an origin because the previous incarnations of this story have provided it already; and film number 19 or 20 or something in a series that includes television shows and comic-book runs that, at this point, would require someone with absolutely nothing else to do to keep track of it. That’s another fire in which fandom is born.

CHIPS (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 5, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Dax Shepard, Michael Peña, Rosa Salazar, Vincent D’Onofrio
written and directed by Dax Shepard

by Bill Chambers I can’t say I was surprised to see another movie based on a television series flop when CHIPS failed to earn back its meagre $25 million budget last spring. 21 Jump Street is the only recent one that’s stuck, and that had star power behind it, as well as a stubborn presence in pop culture thanks to Johnny Depp. Plus–and this is important–it was good. CHIPS is driven by career supporting actors, and, like Baywatch after it, perhaps, is based on a show that people remember like the candy of their childhood: wistfully, but with reflex revulsion. And unlike when, say, The Flintstones came out (1994, the heyday of the TV-to-film adaptation), there’s no rerun culture cultivating “new” fans of “CHiPS”. If the title still produces a look of recognition in younger viewers, it’s probably as a synecdoche for cop shows the way that “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” are synonymous with westerns. The specifics–was there a guy named Porch or Punch or something?–have long since evaporated from the collective conscious. Such is the fate of most pre-prestige television in the age of cord-cutting and so-called “YouTube stars,” but studios today lack the courage to be originators, preferring even the elusive clothing of a brand’s ghost to sending a movie out into the world naked.

Baby Driver (2017)

June 26, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Music, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Ansel Engort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jamie Foxx
written and directed by Edgar Wright

by Walter Chaw Edgar Wright is a good filmmaker and a better fan. The things he likes, he likes better than other people. It makes him the perfect choice for a zombie movie, a buddy movie, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type alien-invasion movie, even a videogame movie. What Edgar Wright doesn’t appear to be is the type of Sidney Lumet/Walter Hill, gritty 1970s action-film auteur he’d probably like to be. With his new film, he’s going for Report to the Commissioner but coming up with The Super Cops–and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, except that straining for one impacts the effortlessness and unfiltered joy of the other. Baby Driver lands somewhere in the area of Peckinpah’s The Getaway with its nasty rogue’s gallery and Hill’s The Driver with its enigmatic hero and his way with cars before sliding off the rails at the end, which feels like, of all things, the climax of Christine. Yet for a few effortless minutes at the beginning, it’s something all its own, and it’s delirious. It’s the feeling you get when you first see Shaun of the Dead: like watching a favourite film for the first time again. I like that Wright loves all of these guys and their movies, but I wish he’d pick a lane. I admire his ambition and taste a great deal. But his far-ranging interests have made a disjointed mix-tape of this picture. It’s the kind you make to impress instead of from the heart. For what it’s worth, and it’s not worth a lot, I just selfishly sort of wish he’d do more Cornetto films. How many flavours are there, anyway? At least seven, right? Let’s get on that.