2020 Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

All the Moons (2020) – Shudder

February 10, 2022****/****, 2020, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, France, Spain, Streaming, Vampire

Ilargi Guztiak
****/****
starring Haizea Carneros, Josean Bengoetxea, Itziar Ituño, Zorion Eguileor
written by Igor Legarreta, Jon Sagalá
directed by Igor Legarreta

by Walter Chaw The Catholic Church has an outsized influence in the events of the last couple of centuries. They have increasingly occupied the role of collective boogeyman in the West as we start to reckon with the consequences of Manifest Destiny, the Age of Exploration, and the attempts to eradicate indigenous peoples in the name of a wrathful God too small to allow other faiths. The mission project in the West, the Residential schools designed to separate children from their cultures in the name of a monoculture arrayed around a cannibalistic blood cult steeped in atrocities committed under the banner of their notion of Heaven. The Magdalene laundries in Europe, the sexual abuse scandals so rampant they’re less scandals than functions of a diseased system that shelters monsters, shuffling them around to unsuspecting diocese to avoid coming clean about the extent of their callow predation. The church has aligned itself with the “pro-life” movement in the United States, a fanatical and radicalized cult invested in the oppression of women and sexuality. Heavily politicized, they suckle at the public teat and continue a baked-in tradition of profiting greatly from the fear and loathing of the very poor, the very desperate, the very stupid. Every new revelation is met with obfuscation, denial, and obstruction instead of a willingness to shine light into the corners of their unresolvable, bestial intolerance and sinfulness. Throughout history, the Catholic Church, as an organization, has proved emblematic of absolute power corrupting absolutely. It’s become a synecdoche for abuse. Of course, this makes it a fertile plot where fulsome gardens of horror can grow.

Siberia (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 27, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Greece, Horror, Italy, Mexico, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parents’ bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldn’t make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldn’t see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didn’t know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferrara’s Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though I’d already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, you’re confronted with two beginnings–two approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called “First Years”). In the prologue, Jung writes:

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 9, 20212020, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it’s not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn’t the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world–who’s playing an immortal superhero–tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I’m saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020); Freaky (2020) [Killer Switch Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

February 10, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Teen, Thriller

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990/2020) – Blu-ray Disc

January 27, 20211990s, 2020, 2021, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Gangster

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia
written by Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Bill Chambers I wasn’t a fan of 2019’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, but I’m OK with it existing because Apocalypse Now is Francis Ford Coppola’s Great American Novel, and I don’t think he’ll ever truly finish writing it. I don’t care that he recut The Cotton Club, either, especially since his intentions with that one were to give the movie back to its Black performers, who got marginalized in the theatrical version of a film designed to celebrate the Roaring Twenties from inside the Harlem jazz scene. And I enjoyed the bloat of The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, though I’m bummed it knocked the original cut out of circulation–the real scourge of these variant editions. Alas, The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (hereafter Coda), Coppola’s shortened remix of the famously flawed conclusion to the Godfather trilogy, finally tested my patience for his compulsive tinkering. The Godfather Part III‘s problems were always foundational, the result of a studio’s impatience and parsimony and a filmmaker’s baffling interpolation of his own dynasty into the fictional one he helped create, and these are bells that can’t be un-rung. To believe that a new edit was the magic bullet is to blame the heroic Walter Murch–who discovered the movie hiding in The Conversation‘s hot mess of footage back in the day–for the picture’s shortcomings. (Patently absurd, in other words.) It’s interesting to me that in 1991, The Godfather Part III was upgraded to a so-called “Final Director’s Cut” in which Coppola and Murch tried to solve the issue of too much Sofia Coppola by adding more of her, reinstating most notably a rooftop heart-to-heart between Michael (Al Pacino) and Mary Corleone (Sofia) that resurfaces in an abridged form in Coda. (Sadly, the 170-minute Final Director’s Cut permanently resigned the 162-minute theatrical cut to the dustbin of history.) Sans Murch, Coppola sentimentally snips a few of Sofia’s more girlish line readings, as if it’s not too late to spare her from ridicule–as if those weren’t the endearing parts of her uncomfortable performance.

Minor Premise (2020)

January 20, 20212020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, VOD

***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Paton Ashbrook, Dana Ashbrook
written by Justin Moretto, Eric Schultz, Thomas Torrey
directed by Eric Schultz

by Walter Chaw The engine driving Eric Schultz’s Minor Premise, already tangled and the highest of high concepts, is in fact deceptively simple: What would happen if we could map every individual personality trait we house in our heads and then, once mapped, what would happen if we tried to isolate the one we liked? Jerry Lewis did a variation on this with his The Nutty Professor, a film that is, among other things, a withering assessment of former partner Dean Martin and his single setting of sociopathic charm. Lewis indicts himself as well as buck-toothed and bumbling, brilliant but pathetic, yearning for some Dino blood to stiffen his backbone. Minor Premise posits that “Rat Pack” is just one of nine settings for us; brilliant, troubled scientist Ethan (Sathya Sridharan) wonders if his productivity might be elevated by cutting out all the noise and letting “intellect” take the wheel.

Sputnik (2020)

January 19, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Russia, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Pyotr Fyodorov, Fedor Bondarchuk, Anton Vasilev
written by Oleg Malovichko, Andrey Zolotarev
directed by Egor Abramenko

by Walter Chaw It should come as no shock that there were so many superlative horror films in 2020–not because 2020 was a year of horrors, but because horror films have always been the canary in the coal mine. That a few of these warnings are arriving in the middle of the end carries the added melancholy knowledge that none of this is was unexpected. I think I even said something that November night in 2016 about how we were about to get some real bangers in genre cinema the next few years. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Clearly. Once the dust settles and whatever’s left of us finds a moment to compare notes, a few of the worst will try to say that no one could have seen this coming. But everyone knew, everyone knows, and yet here we are anyway. Tiresias posed the rhetorical question a few millennia ago, “How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise?” It’s terrible, Terry. The fucking worst.

Minari (2020)

January 10, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama

****/****
starring Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Youn Yuh-jung, Will Patton
written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw I didn’t like my grandmother, either–the way she smelled (mothballs, I think)–but I always equated it with Taiwan and foreignness, you know, the parts of myself I was trying to burn away so the kids would accept me at my predominantly white school. If I recall correctly, all the way through high school I was one of maybe two or three Asian students. A great-aunt of mine visited one year. She fantasized about killing the geese at the park and eating them. It made me crazy when she spoke this way. I was mortified, embarrassed to be out with her; I walked apart from my family as if the distance would make people forget I wasn’t white. My grandmother would tell me about how stupid Americans were and how different my parents were here, how they didn’t used to fight like they do now that worry over money dominated our lives. My dad was a brilliant guy, a grandmaster Go player with a Ph.D. in Geochemistry. Or he would have had one, but he didn’t get along with his professors–and, he would tell me, he was very bad at German. (For a while, the only textbooks for what he was studying were written in German.) So he opened stores, learned silversmithing, and created jewelry. And he made a lot of business investments that were mostly failed that served to alienate him from us, strain his marriage, and rush him to the grave when he was 54. That’s seven years older than I am now.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – Netflix

January 6, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid
directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw The thing I say about Charlie Kaufman films is that I never really understand them, but they always seem to understand me. I suppose there are many ways to unpack his work, but it always only means one thing to me, and I wish I could articulate what that one thing is. If I were able to, I would know something important. Then I wonder if I don’t know it already, and I’m just protecting myself from articulating it because the thing that is important to know is also very painful to know. I’m Thinking of Ending Things tells me what it’s about when Jake (Jesse Plemons), on an interminable drive home to the family farm with his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley), tries in vain to recite the first few lines of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Lucy interrupts him as he starts to make fun of the long title (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”), asking if he’s sure that’s not the body of the poem and generally souring the atmosphere enough that Jake gives up. The first lines of the Immortality Ode are:

“The 50 Best Films of 2020” by Walter Chaw

January 3, 20212020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

There will be libraries written about the fallout from 2020: memoirs and sociological studies and an entire generation of art forever coded to this collective flashpoint. If the trauma from an event like 9/11 can reshape the discourse for the next decade, how long will the afterimage of the pandemic–of probably 500,000 known dead when all’s said and done from wilful mishandling and a lack of financial, medical, and institutional support–linger in the minds of the survivors? How will we, together, come to terms with our current status as a banana republic, vanquished in a non-shooting war by foreign dictators, and on the verge of witnessing the pathetic, ignoble death of our brief experiment? It will go, and we won’t even fight.

Tenet (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 29, 20202020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The misbegotten love child of Christopher Nolan’s own Memento and Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk, Nolan’s Tenet is chonky Looper, a bloated, high-concept actioner that, alas, lacks Rian Johnson’s light touch and deftness with moments of genuine wonder and delight. It’s not the Titanic, it’s the iceberg; not a towering example of man’s hubris, but the ironic, frozen engine of its spectacular undoing. Freud liked to talk about how the unconscious was like an iceberg: only the very tip is visible, while the bulk of its mass is subsumed beneath. Freed from metaphor and employed instead as a simile, the hidden depths of an iceberg are more ice, just wetter. Tenet is like the first two Back to the Future movies but longer, not as good, and, uh, wetter.

The Midnight Sky (2020) – Netflix

December 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall
screenplay by Mark L. Smith, based on the book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw Of late, I’ve wondered what my madness will come up with when it reaches the point of conjuring metaphors. Will it be a house of peeling wallpaper, rats in the spaces between the upstairs as a reference to me falling apart? Will it be the phantom of the ghost of a memory of something I regretted doing as a child, made manifest as a foundling I must take care of but can’t ever quiet? Maybe it’ll be the manuscript I write obsessively in spirals on the floor, or the way I wipe down every surface, exposed and hidden, in a Lady Macbeth-like compulsion to erase the indelible stink of a lifetime of creeping moral corruption. Maybe it’ll just be three ghosts telling me it’s not too late. It is too late for Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), who sits by himself in an abandoned arctic research facility in 2046, three weeks after THE EVENT that has caused Earth to become uninhabitable for humans–though not so uninhabitable that Dr. Augustine Lofthouse doesn’t have time to eat cereal and give himself blood transfusions. Metaphors have survived, too.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

December 23, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

WW84
½*/****
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

Soul (2020)

December 22, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Music, Pixar

***/****
story and screenplay by Pete Docter, Mike Jones, Kemp Powers
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) teaches middle-school band to a group of largely-disinterested kids and dreams of becoming a big-time jazz pianist like the one he saw in some smoky bar his dad dragged him to one time when he was a kid. His dad was a musician, see, and made a little name for himself. Joe’s mom, Libba (Phylicia Rashaad), is a seamstress who owns her own business. She funded Joe’s dad’s “career” because the world is hard on small things. (Artists and their dreams, too.) Joe is offered a full-time teaching position on the same day he scores a gig with the great saxophonist/vocalist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett)–the same day, as it happens, he gets into a terrible accident that will result in his death unless he can convince the superintendents of an A Matter of Life and Death-esque afterlife to give him a second chance. That second chance comes in the form of 22 (Tina Fey), an “unsparked” soul needing to find that certain je ne sais quoi in order to be “born” in, I presume, a human host body on Earth. The rules are diaphanous, with no great expectation to ever cohere. It doesn’t matter. Pete Docter’s Soul isn’t that kind of fantasy. It isn’t about the metaphysical, after all; it’s really only about something as simple yet as difficult as the importance of living in the moment. Gathering ye rosebuds whilst one might, if you will. It’s not deep. I guess it doesn’t have to be.

News of the World (2020)

December 20, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Western

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham
screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles
directed by Paul Greengrass

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw It’s a “Spongebob Squarepants” gag, maybe, or something from “Phineas & Ferb”. Some smart, post-modern cartoon. There’ll be a bunch of quick-cuts, several different angles, self-conscious camera movements, and whooshing noises to reveal, at the end of it all, a snail or a sloth moving along glacially. Maybe the punchline is a frog giving out a bored ribbit. This is how Paul Greengrass starts News of the World as well, with Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kidd the bored frog in question. So much sound and fury in the opening moments of the piece, ending with the exciting reveal of Captain Kidd packing his horse to go somewhere. The movie doesn’t get better as it goes along, but it does calm down a little, settling into the comfortable cadence of a frictionless, awards-season prestige piece so aerodynamic it’ll pass right through you without leaving a mark. Like magic. Call it “The Road to Perdition, Anti-Western Edition” and you’d know enough about it to save yourself the fat awards-season runtime.

On the Rocks (2020)

December 16, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Romance, Streaming

****/****
starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Of all the people making them, Sofia Coppola makes Sofia Coppola movies better than anyone else. Her body of work is remarkable for its consistency–such as that of a Japanese master like Ozu or Mizoguchi, frankly. So the chief complaint of nepotism levied against her strikes me as something of a mixed blessing. I don’t know that many creators have ever had the cachet to make exactly the films they want to make. Every single time. And the ones I can think of for which this is also true, it either wasn’t always true, hasn’t resulted in the level of visibility that Coppola’s films earn, or tend to be the province of men exclusively. I wonder about the resentment of some critics towards Coppola for somehow not being representative enough, as though any one artist can or should be expected to check every box. Best, often, not to try. I think of another woman and filmmaker with a similar amount of creative single-mindedness, Claire Denis, scoffing in an interview with Jonathan Romney of THE GUARDIAN when asked about the Hollywood #MeToo movement: “That’s a discussion that’s only being had in rich countries. The world is not just the United States and Europe. It’s a debate of spoiled children. I couldn’t care less about the Weinstein affair.” Where Denis is indicated mostly by how little she cares what you think, Coppola is branded as a figure mortally wounded by her time in the public view. That vulnerability, real or only perceived, inextricably infuses every frame of her movies with just a little extra trembling pathos.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

December 14, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell’s feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade’s Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it’s spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it’s rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

Open Hart: FFC Interviews Julia Hart

December 12, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

My grad advisor in British Romanticism, Brad Mudge, had this thing where he’d ask, after reading a poem, where the poem “breathes.” I always loved that question; I love it still. It speaks to me of understanding that art will, when it’s done well, cease to become something extant and begin to become something internal. The Romanticists–Shelley, I think it was–talk about the words of poets as seeds that engender new ideas in the heart of the reader. The moment I’m Your Woman “breathes” for me is in a diner sequence midway through where our hero, Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), tells her temporary protector, Cal (Arinze Kene), how after a series of miscarriages, she “burned” all the desire for a child out of herself to protect herself from more heartbreak. Already a good film, I’m Your Woman becomes a great one here in this open, vulnerable conversation about something that happens to as many as 20% of known pregnancies. It’s so prevalent an event that common wisdom dictates you don’t share your pregnancy news until well into a pregnancy in anticipation of it. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages (one more traumatic than the others, all of them a death of hope) before we successfully carried our first child to term.

Coming to America (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

December 10, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Eddie Murphy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, John Amos
screenplay by David Sheffield & Barry W. Blaustein
directed by John Landis

by Bill Chambers When I interviewed the great documentarian Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame, he asked me if I’d ever seen Coming to America, and I didn’t know quite how to answer him. There was a time, during my adolescence in the mid-to-late ’80s, when not seeing the latest Eddie Murphy movie would’ve put a serious crimp in my social life–when the extremely homophobic routines of Eddie Murphy “Delirious” (a.k.a. Eddie Murphy: Comedian, which my friend Joel gave to me on vinyl for my 12^th birthday) constituted the lingua franca of my peers, for worse or for worse. This was also the age of PayTV and home video, when it was not uncommon to watch a film you liked over and over again until you practically fused with it; I liked Coming to America. I liked it, and lots of kids my age liked it, I suspect, because it made us feel like adults with its titties and swears but basically coddled us with a plot out of Disney and a laid-back vibe to match. I’d soured on it in the years since, partly out of fear it was a low-key minstrel show. I’m still not sure that it isn’t, but anyway, in answer to James’s question, I said “yep.”

Total Recall (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

December 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman, based on the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bryant Frazer Before watching Studiocanal’s new restoration of the 30-year-old science-fiction adventure Total Recall, I had only vague memories of seeing it on opening night. I mean, I remembered that I hated it, but I wasn’t sure why. I was already a Paul Verhoeven fan based on RoboCop, though I didn’t know anything else about his work. I know I was put off by the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger puts a bullet in a woman’s head and then yuks it up with one of his trademark murder jokes. Sure, the screenplay has taken pains to establish the character’s unforgivable duplicity, but that’s the problem: She’s disposable, and she’s a punchline. (No wonder Sharon Stone jumped at the chance to play a serial murderer of men in Verhoeven’s next film.) And I recall that I was annoyed beyond reason by the film’s climax, which involves a very sudden change to the environment on Mars. The science behind it struck me as insultingly preposterous. Still, I think what I really objected to, what actually offended me, was the light tone. After RoboCop, which struck me as an appropriately sick joke about fascist tendencies in American law enforcement (still in the news!), I guess I expected Verhoeven to treat Philip K. Dick’s epochal ruminations on human consciousness, thought, and identity with some gravity (cf. the similarly Dick-inspired Blade Runner) instead of turning them into a wildly overblown comic-book complete with an absurdly-ripped muscleman as the self-doubting superhero at the centre of the action. That’s on me; Looking back on Total Recall after three decades, I can see it more clearly. For Verhoeven, the cartoonishness is the point.

Love and Monsters (2020) – VOD

December 7, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, VOD

***/****
starring Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Dan Ewing, Michael Rooker
screenplay by Brian Duffield & Matthew Robinson
directed by Michael Matthews

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie someone like Joe Dante might have made for Roger Corman once upon a time, Love and Monsters, Michael Matthews’s follow-up to his Five Fingers for Marseilles, is a joyfully, unashamedly silly American kaiju modest in its ambitions and occasionally poignant for that modesty. In Love and Monsters, a broad (very broad) updating of L Q. Jones’s deep-cut cult movie of Harlan’s Ellison “A Boy and His Dog,” a lovable schlub named Joel (Dylan O’Brien) is ensconced in a bunker with a handful of other survivors thanks to a plague of monsters that has obliterated 95% of the human population. It’s possible to go deep on how these monsters are the result of “chemicals” raining down on the planet because emergency rockets were fired into a looming asteroid, and how if this is a quarantine allegory, its ultimate message that you should leave quarantine is unfortunately-timed, but the picture is too good-natured to deserve much opprobrium for misreading the room.

Mank (2020) – Netflix

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Streaming

**½/****
starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance
screenplay by Jack Fincher
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw I thought a lot, as I am wont to do from time to time, of the 1996 adult film Shock: Latex 2–directed by an interesting artist working in a devalued genre, Michael Ninn–while watching David Fincher’s new film, Mank, based on the life of Hollywood Golden Age screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Both films are fetish items, anchored to a specific time and aesthetic, and both deal with eroticized figments of active, sometimes onanistic, imaginations. They even use the same techniques to imitate mediums, the better to replicate sensations attached to genres, cults of personalities, periods of time. The former, the literal porno, has transitional scenes involving a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who serves as a sort of phantasmagoric guide loosely tying together a series of otherwise largely-disconnected vignettes. (Clive Barker uses this rampantly eroticized icon to similar effect in his short story “Son of Celluloid.”) Fincher, meanwhile, uses screenplay-text chyrons to announce sequences involving an entire cast of cunning simulacrums of objects of that same fetishistic–at least for the cinephile–significance.

Catching Up (2020) – VOD

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Romance, VOD

**½/****
starring Bill Crossland, Francesca Carpanini, Isabella Pisacane, Johnathan Fernandez
screenplay by Bill Crossland & Patrick Morris
directed by Bill Crossland

by Angelo Muredda Disabled men finally get that ’80s-tinged coming-of-age dramedy they ordered in Bill Crossland’s Catching Up, which feels at once like a hyper-niche genre exercise and something a bit too user-friendly for the masses to really say what it needs to say about its subjects’ sexual hang-ups. Appropriately, given the light representational twist of the premise and the title’s suggestion of something overdue, the film’s protagonist, Frank (played by Crossland, who also co-wrote the script with Patrick Morris and co-conceived the project with Mindy Beach), isn’t a high-school student on the verge of adulthood but rather a teacher, albeit one who still lives at home with his parents, who relate to him as both caretakers and friends. Along with Crossland’s uniquely specific casting–to the chagrin of this disabled writer and probably the filmmaker, too, it’s still a novelty to see a physically disabled actor playing a physically disabled character, let alone one they’ve written and directed–that quirk in the narrative trajectory makes Catching Up pretty novel despite its less convincing efforts to court a wider audience.

Requiem for a Dream (2000) [Director’s Cut] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 26, 20202000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
screenplay by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky, based upon the book by Selby Jr.
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Bryant Frazer Few films are anywhere near as well made–as fierce and committed–as Requiem for a Dream, which stands as a 20-year-old landmark in an especially fertile era of New York indie filmmaking and one of the most expertly executed feel-bad narratives in the history of popular culture. Darren Aronofsky is a hell of a director, but he’s always been a little, well, intense for my taste. He’s got vision and passion to spare, and he clearly inspires dedication and devotion from his actors, yet I always feel there’s something critical missing from the films themselves. If π is David Lynch without an angle on the truly bizarre and Black Swan is David Cronenberg without the painful psychological acuity, then Requiem for a Dream is John Waters without the sense of humour. I know Waters is friendly with Aronofsky, but imagining him watching this in a dark theatre and positively cackling at its most painfully outré gambits is what helps get me through its pitiless final act.

Spokesmen: FFC Interviews Kyle Marvin & Michael Angelo Covino

November 14, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Towards the end of Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin's The Climb, anti-hero Mike goes to see a movie by himself at an arthouse theatre doing a repertory screening of Pierre Étaix's Le Grand Amour. The scene quoted in brief is part of the film's framing device in which the hero, played by Étaix himself, is about to be married, an event which causes him to ruminate on past loves and the series of events leading up to this moment. In speaking with Mr. Covino and Mr. Marvin, I misremembered a Jerry Lewis quote about Étaix, thinking he'd said he had met two geniuses in his life: himself and Étaix. In truth, what he'd said was he understood what genius was twice, the first time when he looked up the word in the dictionary, the second when he met Étaix. The truth paints Lewis in a better light, but it's not as funny. Lewis went on to cast Étaix in his self-suppressed Holocaust melodrama The Day the Clown Cried.