2022 Archives - Page 4 of 6 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Lightyear (2022)

June 26, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi

**/****
screenplay by Jason Headley, Angus MacLane
directed by Angus MacLane

by Walter Chaw Angus MacLane’s handsome-looking Lightyear gets enough things right that it’s unfortunate it can’t quite shake how its best parts are borrowed from Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War. It has more problems than that, granted, mainly with how its thin supporting cast fails to give the film the humour and pathos it needs to honour the by-now-familiar “heartwarming tearjerker” Pixar formula. There’s not a lot of rewatch value here, alas, and that has everything to do with Lightyear‘s awkward dialogue and inability to stick the landing–maladies, both, that afflicted co-writer Jason Headley’s previous Pixar outing, the similarly disappointing and COVID-doomed Onward. The highlight of the piece is robot cat SOX (Peter Sohn), who provides the film its credulous audience surrogate as well as its adorable animal-sidekick comic relief. By himself, SOX saves Lightyear, though he can’t elevate it above the airless jokes and pained delivery. What a shame, considering the movie sets a new bar in terms of the complexity of its digital imagery and animation. With Taika Waititi in the cast, I gotta think they could’ve hit him up for a quick joke polish.

New on Our Patreon

June 22, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

by Bill Chambers Heads-up, current and future Patreons: We recently launched SlipStreams, a weekly column in which Walter Chaw and I take turns recommending four titles currently streaming in either the U.S., Canada, or both. In the current "volume" (#3), which went up this afternoon, I pay tribute to the late, great Ray Liotta in choosing three semi-forgotten films that are among his late-career highlights. Meanwhile, the latest edition (#27) of Walter's regular feature Life During Wartime finds him screening Don't Look Now with his daughter; it might be my personal favourite of this long-running series. These pieces are available to any and all subscribers of our Patreon. We don't do "tiers," since the primary purpose of our Patreon is to support this, the mothersite, but we did feel we owed a few bonus goodies to those generous souls keeping FILM FREAK CENTRAL afloat.

Elvis (2022)

June 20, 20222022, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Luke Bracey, Olivia DeJonge
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromwell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is part Perfume, part Immortal Beloved–which is to say, it’s horny as fuck and formulates music as mass delusion and mind control. Safe to say, the sordid story of the King of Rock-and-Roll is the perfect match for a maximalist director I have found to be excessive to the point of obnoxious, even on those rare occasions where I’ve liked the movie anyway (see: Moulin Rouge!). Before Elvis, there wasn’t an establishing shot Baz didn’t torpedo with gratuitous angles and “whooshing” sound effects; before Elvis, his films were not just childish but relentlessly, punishingly childish. The first half of Elvis is more frenetic than the last, though neither sports any affectations that don’t augment the story in positive ways. Dissolves, triple-split screens, restless camera movements–they all underscore the breathless headlong rush of Elvis’s rise from broke Tupelo hillbilly living in the “Black” part of town to the biggest-selling solo recording artist in history. When it comes time for his inevitable fall, Luhrmann places it in a sociopolitical context, toning down his trademark freneticism in favour of a, most shockingly of all perhaps, thoughtful analysis of several factors that may have played into Elvis’s decline into paranoia, drug abuse, isolation, and despair. A story this familiar in a genre as permanently scuttled by Walk Hard requires a certain wisdom to know what to recap versus what to excavate. Elvis walks that line more than it doesn’t.

The Trouble with Harry (1955) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 13, 2022****/****, 1950s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Shirley MacLaine
screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the novel by Jack Trevor Story
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Once I realized the person I’m supposed to suture with in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry is the title character, the middle of Hitchcock’s three dead protagonists (sandwiched between Rebecca‘s Rebecca de Winter and Psycho‘s Mother), the rest of the movie began to make sense to me. Not a literal sense where the characters’ behaviour is reasonable, thus making the narrative intelligible in a rational way, but an absurdist, Lewis Carroll nightmare sense, where language is revealed to be meaningless and unstable enough to destabilize perceptions of time and space as well. The Trouble with Harry casts Vermont in fall as Wonderland aswarm with madness and violence, lodged in a time-loop and peopled by a gallery of hatters and dormice (and even an Alice, completely over-the-rainbow insane) preserved in an autumnal, solipsistic amber of their own deconstructionist, semantic derangement. The closest analogues in movies are Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michel Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore: the former echoing The Trouble with Harry‘s thesis that if reality is defined by language, then reality is as subject to slippage as language; the latter harking back to this film’s snow-globe meta-fiction, where life and death play out its meaningless permutations in a philosophical exercise inside an alien terrarium. The Trouble with Harry would play well in a double-feature with Scorsese’s existentially terrifying After Hours. Godard’s Alphaville, too–a noir about the prison of words where every room contains a “bible,” which, in reality, is a dictionary with telltale words removed (like “poetry” and “love”), thereby eradicating them from the minds of a citizenry enslaved by a machine god.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

June 9, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Malta, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Emily Carmichael & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw About an hour into Jurassic World Dominion, a nondescript villain–really, the bad guys are all nondescript here, no matter their gender or race–with the admittedly ridiculous name Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze) is pinned on his back by two dinosaurs eating his arms. Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Chad–er, Brad, er…Owen? Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Owen (Chris Pratt), screams at Rainn to give up vital information about the location of the emotionless British cyborg clone from the last film, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who (that?) Owen and his girlfriend/wife/whatever, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), have since adopted. Rainn, before getting his head torn off tastefully offscreen, spills the beans. Here's my problem: why? Why the fuck would he bother to say anything at all? When this scenario plays out in other films, it's because the person being asked the question hopes they'll be freed once they do. But Owen doesn't control these dinosaurs with his magic dinosaur-controlling hand, and it's not framed as Rainn having a change of heart. It's just a blatant misunderstanding of scenes like this, either on purpose or out of cynical desperation, rigged to move a stalled plot along, damning the characters and all sense along the way. What troubles me the most about it is the presumption that no one will notice or that no one will care once they've noticed. J. A. Bayona loaded his Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with a shocking amount of social subtext, appropriate outrage, fairytale scale and wonder, even doom. The only thing Colin Trevorrow manages to create with Jurassic World Dominion (hereafter Dominion) is an endurance test of unusual cruelty that, despite its conspicuous bloat, still leans heavily on an extended voiceover prologue and epilogue to try to inject an illusion of plot into aimless, sometimes-vicious, ugly-looking garbage.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 6, 2022****/****, 1940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Henry Travers
screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, from an original story by Gordon McDonell
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Just by the fact of her, Charlie (Teresa Wright) is dangerous for her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), a violent rebuke of the caustic nihilism of his worldview. She’s too pure, too loving, too good; her existence is proof there’s something wrong with him. Very wrong. She’s so rare a thing, the only way to protect her and, by extension, what he believes about our debased, postlapsarian state is to corrupt her. Really, he’s doing her a favour. I think that Uncle Charlie knows he’s running out of time, that the dragnet around him is tightening at the neck. I think he wants to spend whatever freedom he has left turning his namesake to his way of thinking. Visiting for the first time in too long, he brings gifts for everyone in his sister Emmy’s (Patricia Collinge, her character named after Hitch’s mother) family: his brother-in-law Joe (Henry Travers), his little niece Ann (Edna May Wonacott), his nephew Roger (Charles Bates), and of course Charlie. But she rejects even the notion of receiving a present from her beloved uncle. His presence is good enough, she says.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

June 3, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Greece, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

****/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda “It’s not a completely bad feeling, at least not uninteresting,” muses performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) about his scratchy throat during a quiet moment in David Cronenberg’s career-capping Crimes of the Future, a tender affair about listening to and affirming one’s aging, sick, and mutable body–contrary to all the pre-hype about walkouts and the director’s supposed return to his grimy horror roots. Saul lives with a radical disease called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, which causes him to rapidly spawn superfluous organs. Surgical and life partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes them on stage in underground live shows that fall somewhere between medical procedures you might gawk at on YouTube and ecstatic religious ceremonies. Saul is a full partner in these sensual spectacles, writhing in an open sarcophagus while Caprice mythologizes his new developments like a curator at a Francis Bacon show. Here, though, Saul is simply taking the opportunity to mind the sensations produced by his latest corporeal work of art, noting his symptoms with the observational humour and delicacy of previous Cronenberg protagonists who double as archivists of their changing forms. It’s a trait common not just to scientists spliced with houseflies but to most people living with chronic illnesses.

Mad God: An Interview with Phil Tippett

June 1, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews VFX legend Phil Tippett, writer-director of MAD GOD

by Walter Chaw The heir apparent to stop-motion pioneers Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, Phil Tippett is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. It's his hands animating the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back. He designed creatures for the Cantina and the moving pieces on the Dejarik table. He animated the Rancor, and the bugs in Starship Troopers, and RoboCop's ED-209. He was the "dinosaur supervisor" on Jurassic Park, overseeing the industry-changing transition from stop-motion, Tippett's metier, to CGI. It could've been the end of his career, but his working methods adapted to the digital realm. The product of his hands is, for my generation, the clay of our imagination. I grew up playing with toys based on his designs and watching movies full of his animating spirit, everything from Piranha to The Golden Child. With his place in the pantheon long assured, he moved to the director's chair for the thirty-years-in-the-making Mad God, and the end result is something that looks and feels very much like madness. It's glorious. I spoke with Mr. Tippett over Zoom and was betrayed once or twice by overwhelming emotion; I thought I was done feeling like this about things, but speaking with the father of Vermithrax Pejorative was humbling and exhilarating. If you get the chance to tell your heroes how much their art has meant to you, do that.

25 Candles: Film Freak Central Turns the Quarter-Century Mark

May 31, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

The Screenplay Closet

by Bill Chambers It’s hard for me to remember the BW (Before Walter) times now, but this site was already four years old when Walter Chaw joined it in 2001. In 1997, I was writing reviews for one of my hometown newspapers and living in the only dorm on the campus of York University that offered free broadband in every suite. So I taught myself basic HTML and established a GeoCities page in order to “syndicate” my print reviews. My time at the paper ended pretty much when I graduated from film school; I kept the site going because I needed something to take my mind off the crickets that had suddenly replaced my social life. I convinced myself that FILM FREAK CENTRAL–known, in those first few months, as FILM GEEK CENTRAL, to my everlasting shame–was only temporary and that screenplays, which I’d been writing in my spare time for a decade, were how I was really going to unlock the door to fortune and glory.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

May 27, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick (hereafter Maverick) does everything the Tony Scott original did well a little bit better and doesn’t bother with the rest. What drives this legacy sequel is the sobriety with which it addresses the passage of time–the existential horror of being the oldest person at the bar, of all those pictures that look like what you think you still look like, of the toll of watching your children outgrow you while every anchor you have to this world withers and dies. It is, in other words, a spectacular action film and a mature character drama whose closest analogue might be Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting–a film that, likewise, took its cue from a showy and popular first film and forged from it a work of real substance and surprising pathos. What’s most impressive is how balanced Maverick feels. Its action component is plotted out like an elaborate, aerial heist flick with the stakes obvious and the steps delineated cleanly and simply, so that when it finally comes time to set the dominos in motion and things inevitably go wrong, it’s clear how they went wrong. The picture’s dramatic component is as carefully metered: the love interest and her expectations; the lost father/orphaned son dynamic and how to salvage it; the old rivals-turned-friends and what they owe each other at the end. Maverick is a clockwork, a model of efficiency and effective storytelling; there are multiple avenues to appreciating this movie. I was afraid a sequel to a macho, homoerotic recruitment video bankrolled by the United States military would have no sense of its silliness. I’m happy to be wrong.

Saboteur (1942) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 22, 20221940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Disability, Espionage, Road Movie, Thriller, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn’t often, it’s as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch’s shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill–disastrously, I think–with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there’s a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock’s career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an “all-American” film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he’d left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country’s heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

Scream (2022) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 17, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Wes Craven

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it’s not only self-referential, it’s curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They’re better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they’re more important than even Charlie Kaufman’s extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn’t involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney’s childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series’ masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It’s her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon–and through her suffering, the “rules” of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

Dexter: New Blood (2021-2022) – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Disability, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A Extras C+
“Cold Snap,” “Storm of Fuck,” “Smoke Signals,” “H is for Hero,” “Runaway,” “Too Many Tuna Sandwiches,” “Skin of Her Teeth,” “Unfair Game,” “The Family Business,” “Sins of the Father”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a white buck. Dexter is tracking it through the woods, a regular Natty Bumppo. Though he has a clear shot, something stops him from pulling the trigger, and he falls to his knees in a parody of biblical defeat. A second attempt the following day is foiled when a sharp noise from elsewhere causes the wildlife to scatter, while a third and final try sees him lowering his rifle and surrendering to the beauty of the beast. Dexter and the white buck are kindred spirits–outliers of their species, yet built to blend into their surroundings. Trophies, ultimately, for their rarity. The premiere episode of “Dexter: New Blood”, “Cold Snap,” might be my favourite of the character’s entire television run, because it allows him this brief state of grace. There was a season of “Dexter” where he went searching for signs of a higher power, but it’s here that he finds one, and what makes this so different from our serial-killer Pinocchio’s previous real-boy epiphanies is that, for once, there’s no noise in his head. In fact, this most compulsive of narrators only starts talking to us again after the tranquillity of the moment is shattered, which is a surprisingly understated gambit for “Dexter”. It’s a crowd-pleasing thing, I suppose, when he finally pipes up (it’s Clark Kent ducking into a phone booth, or Popeye squeezing a can of spinach), but it plays to me as bitter commentary on how short-lived inner peace is these days for anyone with a moral compass–even one as faulty as Dexter’s.

We’re Still Here

May 2, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

Thanks for your patience, folks. Lots of good stuff on the way, asap. In the meantime, check out our Master Review Index, which has ballooned of late as we get closer to fully restoring the archives.-Ed.

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision – Books

April 21, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision
FFC rating: 7/10
by Charles Elton

by Bill Chambers Six years after his death, Michael Cimino remains an enigma, shrouded by a swirling mass of rumours and contradictions. A biographer has their work cut out for them. Before reading Charles Elton’s Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision, I took stock of everything I knew about the mercurial filmmaker: that he helmed seven movies during a span of 22 years, the second of which he was fêted for (The Deer Hunter), the third of which he went to director jail for (Heaven’s Gate); and that he gradually began to look different in ways for which time alone cannot account. I also had some preconceived notions about Cimino–that he was vain, an egotist, one who burned a lot of bridges–that are more or less borne out by Elton’s overview, but it’s important to note that Cimino was not around to defend himself when the author went rummaging through his past. (I feel fairly confident in saying, again from the picture Elton paints, that he probably would’ve spent more energy trying to halt the book’s publication altogether.) Though Cimino is not one of the great posthumous bios on the order of David Weddle’s If They Move…Kill ‘Em! or Lee Server’s Baby, I Don’t Care, it does have unique virtues (which I’ll get to) and is reasonably good at preserving Cimino’s dignity while countering or outright demolishing his own unreliable narrative.

All at Once: An Interview with the Makers of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

April 17, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews “The Daniels,” Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writer-directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once

The function–the true function–of art at any time, but particularly in dark times collective and personal, is, I think, to provide evidence of grace. However low, however diminished, however stricken we may find ourselves, here are these artifacts of others who went before us into the breach to retrieve…I don’t know: signposts? Breadcrumbs in the wild, overgrown wood; strings in the labyrinth; a way out or a way in. I don’t know. Everything Everywhere All At Once returned fragments of myself to me that I had not been aware were missing. It is one of the most meaningful films of my life, appearing at a stage of my experience and movie-obsessed existence where I thought it was no longer possible to feel that way about a movie again. It reminded me of why I, more than love, why I need art to fill the spaces in me.

The Northman (2022)

April 12, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers’s latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There’s even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film’s settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers’s previous film, The Lighthouse, and it’s the first of his movies that doesn’t require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

All the Old Knives (2022)

April 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz

by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays “Barley” Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn’t fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides–well, all three sides–against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It’s the best film Schepisi’s made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love’s continued to bloom. They’ve heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I’ve loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It’s one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.

The Contractor (2022)

April 3, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh

by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh’s The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan’s recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon’s “Reacher” series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed “all-American” hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it’s an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down “girl” emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

March 31, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents’ story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It’s an immigrant story–a typical one, I’ve come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it’s a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn’t approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them–they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to “break” my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don’t know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I’m broken. I’m working on fixing it.