Madame Web (2024)

February 17, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

Madameweb

**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson

by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.

Perfect Days (2023)

February 1, 2024Posted in****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Japan

Perfectdays

****/****
starring Kôji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Tomokazu Miura
written by Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) notices little things. Like the sunlight dappling the trees. Or the doomed sproutling, too close to its mother to survive, pushing its way out of the ground. He gestures at the park’s caretaker, asking if it would be all right for him to rescue the plant, and carefully transplants it to a piece of newspaper he’s folded into a cup. Hirayama works for Tokyo, cleaning its network of public toilets. He listens to his collection of ’60s and ’70s music on cassette tapes in his municipal van–dark blue, same as his jumpsuit, the colour playing counterpoint to The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” which provides the soundtrack for our first ride home with him during magic hour. (I have to imagine the character of Niko (Arisa Nakano) was not accidentally named.) Once he returns to his spartan flat, he plants the sapling in a pot and puts it in a room full of its spiritual brothers and sisters at various stages of thriving. Hirayama goes to his favourite restaurant stall in the subway, then a bathhouse, where he soaks and listens to other men converse. Then it’s off to bed reading Faulkner. The first lesson of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is that it is possible to live a full and beautiful life, at least for a while, in a small space: watered, fed, warm, cared for…and wanted, though it isn’t clear at first that anyone is thinking about Hirayama.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

January 30, 2024Posted in2023, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Jackie Chan, Japan, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit
directed by Jeff Rowe

by Walter Chaw There’s a flair to the design of Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (hereafter Mutant Mayhem)–a joy, an edginess, an energy that reminded me instantly of those halcyon MTV days of “Liquid Television”, when things like “Beavis & Butthead” would give way to “Aeon Flux”. It’s outlaw stuff, verging on the experimental, and the images are so vibrant they occasionally feel as if they’ll bounce outside the edges of the screen. I love how the colours behave like they’re refracting through a prism, like neon off the wet pavement of New York City, where the film is set. For as fresh and as the animation feels, as innovative, it’s not so ostentatious as to deviate from considerations of physics and space. It doesn’t draw attention to itself at the expense of character and story. Its hyperreality, its gloss on the new, merely lends urgency to the picture’s quotidian reality. Consider an early scene in which our heroes watch a public screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the middle of Brooklyn. Taught to be afraid of the prejudice of others, they’re hidden in the dark of a rooftop across the way. Seeing Ferris perform in a parade, they dream of what it must be like to go to high school, even of the simple camaraderie of sitting with friends on a humid summer night with a future laid out before them full of possibility rather than a life’s sentence of paranoia and rejection. Having had their fill of longing, they leave the scene, pausing before their descent into the sewers to take in the full tableau of a flickering image on a screen illuminating the crowd gathered before it.

The Adventures of Renny Harlin: FFC Interviews Renny Harlin

January 17, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews
Rennyharlininterviewtitle

Walter Chaw interviews Renny Harlin,
director of THE BRICKLAYER

Renny Harlin is older now. Wiser. He almost made an Alien movie, was thisclose to taking the reins of the James Bond franchise, caught the biggest comedian on the planet in the last ten minutes before his precipitous fall… Harlin was a minute ahead of his time and sometimes a minute behind, and today he has a new movie out, with three more finished and on the way. He thinks the best is ahead for him, and…I might agree. There is something unlovable about Harlin’s films–an irascible, some would say vicious quality that has engendered affection for them despite their gore and what should be noted is an at-times-uncompromising meanness. He shoots action sequences with clarity and logic: bullet strikes feel heavy, car chases physical, his ubiquitous explosions so jarring I remember the cuffs of my pants fluttering when the passenger plane went down in Die Hard 2 on opening night. He is a maximalist who got his start in low-budget horror and graduated, for a brief time, to the blockiest of blockbusters. Then it all went sideways.

The Bricklayer (2024) + The Beekeeper (2024)

January 13, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Greece, Theatrical, UK

Beekeeper

THE BRICKLAYER
***/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Nina Dobrev, Tim Blake Nelson, Clifton Collins, Jr.
screenplay by Hanna Weg and Matt Johnson, based on the novel by Noah Boyd
directed by Renny Harlin

THE BEEKEEPER
**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons
written by Kurt Wimmer
directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw We live in a blizzard, a brutal ice storm, a maelstrom of jagged information–and rather than bringing us any closer to a collective mean, the weight of what we know shoves us back into our balkanized bunkers. Knowledge can be scary; the truth about who we are and our relative inconsequence is terrifying, humiliating. I don’t think we’ll ever recover our sense of, if not unity, at least whatever progress we made towards unity. No, not without bloodshed. Not without a reduction in the noise. We weren’t designed for this onslaught. We don’t have the sorting mechanism for it. It’s not like drinking out of firehose–it’s like drinking out of Niagara Falls. We are a species bent into the fetal position: from fear, for protection. It’s made us mean and mistrustful. “How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.” Sophocles nailed it centuries ago. Perhaps that’s why movies like the John Wick and Mission: Impossible franchises remain so popular: they exist in worlds where there are discernible rules, populated by men who are good at more than manipulating information for personal gain. We like the idea of that, you see–of expertise and righteous purpose, even if it seems like competence is a myth designed to ensnare children and radicalize the gullible. Didn’t we used to be a nation of capable people? Didn’t we used to do things that were for the greater good and not merely profitable (and at someone else’s expense)? Didn’t we used to have causes that weren’t only predatory?

The Holdovers (2023) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

January 9, 2024Posted in****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.