2020 Archives - Page 4 of 7 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Host (2020) – Shudder

August 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, UK

***½/****
starring Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Walter Chaw I’ve spoken in front of audiences large and intimate. I’ve hosted discussions in opera houses, stadiums, and gymnasiums, as well as seminars in classrooms and private homes. When the pandemic hit and I suddenly found whatever teaching or speaking opportunities I was still being offered relegated to “Zoom” meetings, for the first time speaking in public as a professional, I knew anxiety and fear. There’s something about it. Is it that everyone is a foot away from your face? I hosted a discussion group recently that had over 100 attendees. On Zoom, that means there are pages and pages of participants you can scroll through as you’re talking, and it means that every time someone so much as moves, you’re distracted by it. Thrown. Unsettled. Of all the things I didn’t anticipate about this odd period in our time together, it’s this new horror of engagement. Zoom, the fractured screen it represents, reminds me of that scene in Playtime where M. Hulot visits an old war buddy in an apartment building where an entire wall is made of glass. It’s uncanny, wrong, unnatural in a constructed way. It feels like a vivarium, like that old “Twilight Zone” where an astronaut realizes when a wall falls away in his house that he’s on display in an alien zoo. I’m afraid to look, because I see more than the subject can see. I’m afraid because I know they see more than I can see, too. I’m afraid because, in these things, I’m having an intimate, face-to-face conversation with dozens of people I can’t all see, much less respond to. Zoom is a vampire, and I am drained.

The Rental (2020)

July 29, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Thriller, VOD

**/****
starring Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Jeremy Allen White
screenplay by Dave Franco & Joe Swanberg
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw The good version of The Rental, Dave Franco’s directorial debut (which he co-wrote with Joe Swanberg), reminds a lot of Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’s exceptional Hellbent in how it addresses prejudice through the application of genre conventions. The bad version of The Rental is the one that isn’t about any of that and is maybe a little bit racist in that well-intended way people who would be horrified to be thought of as racist are a little bit racist. The good version finds a quartet of friends, lovers, and brothers away for a weekend of privileged R&R at an extravagant Airbnb to celebrate the closing of some big deal that will make them richer with more time and disposable income than they already have. The brothers are unctuous Charlie (Dan Stevens) and pugnacious Josh (Jeremy Allen White). Charlie is married to irritating Michelle (Alison Brie) and business partners with Iranian-American Mina (Sheila Vand), whose main character trait is that she is obviously Iranian-American. That part is from the bad version of The Rental. The good version finds them away on their weekend holiday, met at their rental destination by creepy good ol’ boy Taylor (an exceptional Toby Huss), who has apparently rejected Mina’s attempt to rent–only to go with the white applicant immediately.

Braveheart (1995) [25th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

July 15, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Mel Gibson, Sophie Marceau, Patrick McGoohan, Catherine McCormack
written by Randall Wallace
directed by Mel Gibson

by Walter Chaw Mel Gibson’s Braveheart is a Scottish Dances with Wolves as imagined by a Christian fundamentalist wackadoo who happens to be one of the real movie stars of the last 50 years. He commands the screen as a less-pot-addled Harrison Ford, in complete command of his masculinity and a certain wry, self-deprecating sense of humour. The throughline for Gibson, though, is his obsession with ideological, metaphorical, and literal martyrdom. His public fall and current late-career renaissance play into a very particular neo-Christian storyline and worldview. It’s the engine that drives his defining roles: ex-cop (Mad) Max, who loses his wife and becomes a taciturn saviour for the desperate of the Outback wasteland; suicidal cop Martin Riggs, who loses his wife and becomes the saviour of his older Black partner; ex-episcopal priest Graham Hess, who loses his wife and becomes the saviour of the world; and of course William Wallace, who loses his wife and becomes the saviour of Scotland. A woman’s death turns Gibson into a superhero–his melancholic, Byronic righteousness the only gamma radiation or excuse he needs to go all Revelations on some asses.

Guest of Honour (2020)

July 10, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, VOD

**½/****
starring David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Rossif Sutherland, Luke Wilson
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda “He sounds like one of those people you hear about but don’t see,” Luke Wilson’s pastor Greg tells bereaved daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) early on in Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour, laconically cutting through an exposition dump as only Luke Wilson can. Greg is drafting his eulogy for Veronica’s father, the recently departed health inspector Jim (David Thewlis), for whom the film itself is a kind of prickly eulogy. A cold fish with inscrutable motives (he claims he’s just working to protect the public from contamination, even as he wields his badge with extreme prejudice), Jim is the quintessential Egoyan protagonist. He’s a moral question mark in a suit, like the tax auditors and insurance adjusters who have served the somewhat dimmed star of English-Canadian cinema so well in The Adjuster and Exotica. Imbued with a puckish meanness by Thewlis, Jim is the lynchpin to a modestly successful exercise that epitomizes Egoyan’s annoyingly self-serious puzzle-box style, as well as, thankfully, his playfulness.

The Beach House (2020) – Shudder

July 7, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

**/****
starring Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, Maryann Nagel, Jake Weber
written and directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

by Walter Chaw What’s the conversation to be had around William Eubanks’s Underwater, Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever, and now Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House? How all three, released within six months of each other, foreground a young, capable, female protagonist who understands better–and sooner–than anyone else the nature and intent of an all-consuming calamity. How all three are set in and around the ocean, that archetype of the unconscious for poets and philosophers. And how all three end with what is essentially a return–is it a reunion?–for their unheeded, uncelebrated triumvirate of seers. Indeed, they seem more like heralds than criers. The timing of the films is curious, certainly, and although H.P. Lovecraft seems the denominator for all three, in truth the better archetypal thread to pull here is the vagina dentata: the Charybdis, to be avoided for her indiscriminate thirst. They are fables of a very particular apocalypse, where a masculine impulse towards colonization, exploration, and industrialization has led to the Earth pushing back in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium. In that context, of course, it’s a woman, particularly a young woman, who would recognize both the affront of a full-frontal violation and the retributive rearguard solution. These movies are violent in the way childbirth is contextualized as violent. Lots of shit goes down inside a chrysalis, too.

Gladiator (2000) [20th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

June 30, 20202000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Morocco, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bill Chambers

“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
-Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves), Airplane!

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is good now. I suppose it was always good, if money and Oscars are indicators of quality, but for me, it was a late bloomer whose virtues have seemingly become more visible since the tide of its success receded. I remember Roger Ebert’s review of the film, which he called “Rocky on downers,” as one I felt a kinship with. In print and on television, he was especially dismayed by the “shabby” computer-generated Colosseum. The year before, George Lucas had set The Phantom Menace against digital cityscapes, but Gladiator marked one of the first times CGI was used extensively in a non-fantastical setting. (Harping on the Colosseum is a compliment, really, as in all likelihood it means the other products of the mainframe–the flaming arrows, the crowds, the patchwork performance of Oliver Reed–didn’t draw attention to themselves.) In a currently-offline article published in 2001, I wrote that “Gladiator provokes meatier discussion as the computer age’s first fully dehumanized non-sci-fi film: the late Oliver Reed became a mere mediator for his technologically aided performance, the stony streets of Rome bear an anachronistic (and soulless) patina, and Maximus is the most passive bloodlust-er Hollywood has ever seen, a video game hero on the fritz.” Some context: that was me trying to hex Gladiator‘s chances at the Academy Awards. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Andrei Rublev (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 25, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Soviet Union, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Anatoly Solonitsin, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko, Nikolai Sergeyev
screenplay by Andrei Konchalovsky (as Andron Mikhalkov), Andrei Tarkovsky
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Despite the fact that little is known about the man’s life, Andrei Rublev is considered one of the greatest Russian painters of orthodox Christian icons. Only a single work has been attributed entirely to Rublev with certainty, but it’s a doozy, subtly reconfiguring an earlier, more pedestrian icon drawn from the Book of Genesis into a visually sophisticated meditation on the Holy Trinity. Though this work is generally dated to 1411, Rublev’s elevation to master status is a 20^th-century phenomenon. After a 1918 restoration revealed Rublev’s Trinity to be more brightly coloured and delicately imagined than previously thought–which some experts interpreted as a departure from Byzantine influences in the direction of a more specifically Russian sensibility–Rublev’s reputation soared. The Russian Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky famously put it this way: “There exists the icon of the Trinity by Saint Andrei Rublev; therefore, God exists.”

Irresistible (2020)

June 24, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Rose Byrne
written and directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s Irresistible hates you, absolutely loathes you. It can’t believe it has to talk to you and so it’s smug and dismissive, and then at the end of it all, it offers up three different but equally repugnant endings that give the viewer a variety of shit sandwiches to choose from, though you do have to pick one. As a metaphor for what’s going on in the world right now, it’s on-the-nose. As a movie, it’s an assault more objectionable than any Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke miserabilist exercise, because it clothes itself in an affable sheaf of menial, liberal equivocation–but underneath it’s this boiling, nihilistic condemnation of every single one of you fucking idiots who let it get so bad. It brings to mind nothing so much as George Sanders’s suicide note expressing boredom with the very notion of you to the very last. Everything is terrible. The experiment is over. We failed. There’s no hope. And Irresistible is precisely the kind of asshole who offers a utopian social solution he clearly thinks is a hopeless fantasy but pretends is advice given earnestly so you don’t think he’s the other kind of asshole who just complains about how stupid people are all the time. It’s a film about the mortal tone-deafness of liberals that is itself mortally tone-deaf.

A Keeper of Flocks: FFC Interviews Abel Ferrara

June 15, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Lemme break it down:

I’ve grown up with Abel Ferrara’s films and they’ve grown up with me. His Driller Killer and Ms. 45 were on my exact wavelength when I first sought them out during illicit trips to the video store. I didn’t see it until much later, but his directorial debut, the porn flick 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, would’ve been my vibe back then, too. Watching it now, it’s a prep course for his later work, having the same grindhouse appeal and, as it happens, the same ineffable sense of intimacy that still informs his incomparable sex scenes. Movies for adults in the United States used to be nasty like this sometimes, and no one is nastier than Mr. Ferrara when he sets his mind to it.

June 9, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

With everything going on in the world right now, it's difficult to find the mental bandwidth to think and write about movies. Nevertheless, they're still coming out--on various platforms and streaming services and on Blu-ray and DVD--and I want to assure our readers and patrons that while our coverage has slowed, we have no plans to abandon the site, which turned 23 (!) in May. Partly in celebration of that and partly just to brighten your day, we recently made the first five entries in Walter Chaw's Patreon column "Life During Wartime" available to all. (See links below.) In each…

Tommaso (2020)

June 7, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Greece, Italy, UK

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Maricla Amoriello
written and directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw There’s something about the late careers of musicians that has, in the middle of all this static Sturm und Drang, moved me in ways I don’t know that anything’s ever quite moved me before. The new Bryan Ferry, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithful… So much longing and wistfulness. What’s that quote by who’s that poet who said something along the lines of how the sum of pain, loss, and time is wisdom? I feel more mortal now than I’ve felt since I was a suicidal teen–and even then, I believed my tragic surcease of sorrow would feed a grand, romantic storyline. Now that the world has enacted its apocalypse, I don’t believe my death would be much more than a bump, a tickle, the noise a bird makes when you hit it with your fender. You don’t even slow down if you notice it, but you won’t notice it. Even grief, I’ve found, for all its profundity, is only a caesura in a toneless cacophony. We rumble forward, heedless, encumbered, until the weight of it all crushes us and our decaying bodies are allowed to come to rest at last. That’s all. That’s all there is.

The Invisible Man (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 25, 2020****/****, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
screenplay and screen story by Leigh Whannell
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a masterpiece–an adaptation not so much of H.G. Wells’s book or the James Whale film of it, but of Gavin De Becker’s indispensable The Gift of Fear, a guide for how women can learn to trust their intuition, overcome their denial, and identify signs of men on the verge of becoming violent. Men murder the women they want to possess every day and often bring harm to others in the process. As Margaret Atwood infamously summarized, a man’s greatest fear is that a woman will laugh at him and a woman’s greatest fear is that a man will kill her, and this has shaped our behaviours as a society. Men, as it happens, tend to support other men who are brought to answer for their actions, while women who speak out are castigated, cast out, and blamed for their own victimization. Virtually the only thing the “me too” movement has brought about is false confidence that it’s safe for women to speak out without fear of losing their position or reputation. The world is a foul sty and the bad sleep well.

Days of Thunder (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital; Top Gun (1986) + War of the Worlds (2005) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

May 18, 20201980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tony Scott, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Tom Cruise

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version of Days of Thunder

DAYS OF THUNDER
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Robert Towne
directed by Tony Scott

TOP GUN
**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

WAR OF THE WORLDS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bill Chambers Days of Thunder was not a crapshoot; the dice were loaded. Almost the entire creative team that made Top Gun a hit–the illustrious Robert Towne filled in for the screenwriting duo of Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., and none of the soundtrack artists were invited back–was reuniting to do for NASCAR what the earlier film had done for the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School. Star Tom Cruise had become even more popular in the intervening years, earning an Oscar nomination for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had such an unparalleled track record, having shepherded Flashdance, Top Gun, and the first two Beverly Hills Cops to commercial success, that Paramount confidently renewed their contract at the start of production. As recounted in Charles Fleming’s unsparing High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, under the terms of their renegotiated deal (a “visionary alliance,” as Simpson-Bruckheimer insisted it be called in the trades), they would receive $300M for five pictures–any five pictures–over five years, as well as a host of unprecedented perqs, including creative autonomy and fully-furnished home theatres installed at the studio’s expense. Days of Thunder would be the first production of this visionary alliance. It would also, quite ludicrously, be the last.

The Virgin Spring (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 11, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson
screenplay by Ulla Isaksson
directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer A pivotal film in Bergman’s corpus, The Virgin Spring is also perhaps the most disreputable. Borrowing the basic frame of a story from the 13^th-century ballad “Töre’s Daughter at Vänge,” and set, to gloomy effect, during Sweden’s transition from paganism to Christianity, it chronicles the brutal rape and murder of a teenaged girl carrying candles to church, her father’s equally violent vengeance against the culprits, and (critically, because this is Bergman) his subsequent anguish at the silence of an apparently cruel and uncaring God. Considering the film offers what feels like a concentrated dose of the director’s pet themes, it’s interesting that Bergman has no writing credit on the picture. Instead, he hired the Swedish novelist Ulla Isaksson for the adaptation. Isaksson developed a colourful cast of characters and some background to bolster the material included in the ballad, but her biggest alteration was moving the miraculous appearance of the spring that gives the picture its title to the very end of the story.

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother – Books

May 3, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies, Will Smith

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker
FFC rating: 8/10
by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Bill Chambers Barry Sonnenfeld is a renowned cinematographer and a director with more than a few blockbusters on his resume (The Addams Family, the original Men in Black trilogy), but the Sonnenfeld who’s front and centre in his autobiographical Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker is the raconteur who’s honed his craft on talk shows with comic tales from his civilian life as the offspring of overbearing parents and husband of the beloved “Sweetie,” many of which reach their final form here. Cinephiles may consequently find the book to be something of a disappointment compared to, say, fans of humorists like David Sedaris. While Sonnenfeld does touch on his experiences in filmmaking (including a stint in porn), he skips blithely over some milestones on his CV or remembers them for exceedingly idiosyncratic reasons that won’t sate any conventional curiosity one might have about them. For example, Miller’s Crossing, arguably the pinnacle of his three-movie collaboration with the Coen Brothers, is reduced to the production that climaxed with his wedding. On the other hand, there’s value in Sonnenfeld’s somewhat dumbfounded consideration of his unlikely journey up the Hollywood food chain, which shows that fate and, let’s face it, white male privilege can play major roles in launching a film career. His utter lack of sentiment when it comes to his achievements makes for a tonic against the typical showbiz-dreamer’s success story.

It is also a very, very funny book.

1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 20, 2020****/****, 1980s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Satire, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, UK

Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford

by Walter Chaw George Orwell’s 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother’s intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence…and that’s just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin’s native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn’t published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of “the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it’s worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I’d have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of “the machine.” So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell’s attempt to correct what he identified as that work’s essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.

Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 15, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stallone, Thriller

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

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 12, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Stallone, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors‘ “Five to One,” flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, “Five to One” is a little on the nose (“Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”), but it’s still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War’s acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could’ve been. There’s a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.

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

April 6, 20202020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Fantasy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it’s worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, “it” being a scene from Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing “pieces” summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan’s Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It’s played for laughs, but I wasn’t laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy’s accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who’s been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn’t for you, it’s for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

April 4, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Teen, VOD

**½/****
starring Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Ryan Eggold, Sharon Van Etten
written and directed by Eliza Hittman

by Walter Chaw In Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a young woman seeking an abortion finds one. There’s not much controversy in my mind as to whether or not she should have it, since the film suggests, in a lovely, oblique way, that her pregnancy is the product of abuse–maybe probably definitely absolutely through an incestual relationship with her creepy stepfather (Ryan Eggold). Hittman doesn’t say that this is so, but she doesn’t say that it isn’t so, either. From what we glean of the stepfather’s meanness and cruelty to the family dog, and then from the way our hero, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), reacts to questions about the father of the MacGuffin, we, you know, put things together. Mostly, what we put together is that Never Rarely Sometimes Always is less interested in those details than it is in painting a portrait of how terrifying men are, which is utterly true and also not exceptionally revelatory, as revelations go.