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Dune (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

January 11, 2022****/****, 2021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

Dune Part One
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn’t get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert’s Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book’s story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn’t experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You’ve arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it’s not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called “Caladan”–that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called “Arrakis.” It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it–return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it’s why I’ve read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don’t actually want to know what’s inside the Monolith.

The Novice (2021)

December 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sports, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsyth, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry
written and directed by Lauren Hadaway

by Walter Chaw Lauren Hadaway’s hyphenate debut The Novice is so good, so self-assured, so kinetic and so very much about something that, all hyperbole justified, it heralds the arrival of an important new artist. Garnering instant comparisons to Whiplash for its heart-attack-fuelled kineticism and hyperfocus on the obsessive, gnostic practice of an obscure discipline and to Black Swan for similar reasons as well as its troubled female protagonist, The Novice‘s closest analogue for me is actually Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, a film about the pursuit of knowledge and sublimity free of the depressingly quotidian limitations of the body. The Novice itself is free of Damien Chazelle’s preening and the literalness of the hero’s emotional fracture in Black Swan. Rather, it preaches the gospel of being fine with who you are not despite how fucked up and “intense” you might be, but because of that. At the end of all that auto-excavation, it says that the self, whatever its attendant flaws and hardwired weaknesses, has intrinsic value, and the knowledge of that value comes with immeasurable power. The title of Hadaway’s film recalls the Christian concept of the religious “novitiate,” that period where a person called to servitude enters into intense study, constant prayer, forced brotherhood, and an invasive interiority, all to prove whether or not they will be welcomed into the fold. In The Novice, the novitiate is Alex Dall, and the “fold” is everyone at her school who thinks she’s some kind of freak.

SDAFF ’21: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

December 7, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Gûzen to sôzô
****/****
starring Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai
written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Ryusuke Hamaguchi listens well. His films may be indicated by the denseness of their dialogue, their patience in allowing their characters to speak it, and his trust in his actors to do unbroken takes and in his audience to go along for the ride, but what enchants about them is how carefully they hear what their characters are saying, and how they invite us to do the same. At some point during each of Hamaguchi’s films, I’ve found myself leaning in–not because the mix is too low, but because I’m socially conditioned to lean towards a speaker when they’re saying something that’s at once difficult for them to say and imperative that they say it. I’m giving these characters eye contact and attention. Hamaguchi’s movies are a form of communion–that is to say, a connection that touches on profundity. Given their intimacy and wisdom, they hold within them the capacity to rip my guts out. Which they do, remorselessly and sweetly. Does that describe the concept of “winsome”? In “Magic,” the first of the three short films that comprise Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, beautiful Tsugumi (Hyunri), in the back of a long cab ride with her friend Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), describes a platonic first date in which she and her partner “caress” each other with their words. Not “talk dirty,” she clarifies–getting to know the other person by telling the truth when lies are expected. Through Tsugumi, Hamaguchi is talking about his process.

West Side Story (2021)

December 2, 2021****/****, 2021, Crime, Drama, Musical, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Rachel Zegler
screenplay by Tony Kushner, based on the stage play by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw West Side Story is the perfect vehicle for all of Spielberg’s prodigious strengths while deemphasizing his obvious weaknesses. In that way, it reminded me of another Stephen Sondheim adaptation, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, wherein a savant-like visual artist is paired with a genius for storytelling, plotting, and characterization. It occurs to me that every single Robert Wise film would be better had Spielberg directed it. This isn’t because Wise butchered The Magnificent Ambersons and betrayed Val Lewton, it’s because he played in the same sandbox as Spielberg and no one has ever been better at building those particular sandcastles. There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Spielberg, with a drumbeat gathering power on the soundtrack, transitions from a sign at a crossroads pointing to Berlin to a book burning in a public square. Kind of like the ones they’re organizing in central Virginia right now. He does it again in A.I. in the lead-up to the Flesh Fair. The combination of action and the rising thrum on the soundtrack is…visceral? Yes, that; kinetic, too. Chills-inducing. He uses the tactic again in the build-up to the “Mambo” number as Anita, Bernardo, and Maria arrive at the school gymnasium for the big dance. You hear the music, muted, through the doors, and then they’re thrown open, and Jerome Robbins’s ageless choreography explodes with all the furious vibrancy a collaboration between Jerome fucking Robbins and Steven fucking Spielberg promises. It’s a synesthetic representation of life and youth, ridiculously effective. We speak of spectacle films and the magic of “big” movies–I don’t know that I’ve felt a film’s scale like this in decades. All of this West Side Story‘s showstoppers are just that. They are alive and fresh, and Spielberg gets that when you have a Robbins or a Fosse or an Agnes DeMille, your job is to dance it like your shoes are on fire and let us see the bodies from head to toe. There is possibly no better visual storyteller in the history of movies than Spielberg, who finds in this partnership with great artists alive and dead the truest fruition of his gift.

No Time to Die (2021)

November 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Cary Fukunaga’s No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth canonical James Bond film, is the best one since Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and for many of the same reasons. One could hazard that the similarities, a vulnerable Bond chief among them, comprise the guiding principle behind this picture, with its multiple call-outs to Fleming’s books–On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in particular, along with its downbeat, mortal sequel You Only Live Twice, the last Bond Fleming completed himself. In the latter, 007’s boss, M, uses the same Jack London quote to eulogize the presumed-dead superspy (“The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time”) that his screen counterpart (Ralph Fiennes) uses to eulogize Bond in No Time to Die. It ends with Bond, initially dumbstruck by grief over the death of his wife in the previous novel (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), now stricken by amnesia and about to abandon his impregnated wife–the child a development Fleming never got to bring to term, but who finds her fruition in Fukunaga’s film. At a late point in No Time to Die, two combatants reaching the end of their struggles agree that the only reason to live is to leave a legacy. I find it touching that this film brings a small and precious note of Fleming’s to life, so many years after his death.

SDAFF ’21: Drive My Car

November 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival

ドライブ・マイ・カー
****/****
starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura
screenplay by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami
directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” is a model of the rich economy that typifies his writing. The prose–inasmuch as I can tell from its English translation–is simple and declarative, and the action, such as it is, is mundane. But that simplicity is akin to the “Drink Me/Eat Me” invitations presented to Alice on the outskirts of Wonderland–the Red Pill/Blue Pill keys to entire landscapes littered with signs and referents pointing to the things Murakami was thinking (of) as he was writing, possibly even to what he was reading immediately before setting pen to paper. Midway through the short story, the protagonist, Kafuku (a homonym for Kafka), a small-time stage actor who has had to hire a driver because of a drunk-driving accident, mentions his love of zoning out to Beethoven–or, on occasion, American soft rock–on the way home from the theatre. On the way in? He listens to a cassette of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”, the play in which he’s playing the lead role. Some days, he’ll close his eyes and try to catch his driver, a young woman called Misaki, shifting gears on his 12-year-old yellow Saab. As Murakami describes it, Misaki is such a good driver that Kafuku can only tell gears are being changed by the engine’s sound, which he compares to an insect flying nearer, then away, then back again.

Frank & Zed (2021) + Mad God (2021)

October 9, 2021****/****, 2021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

FRANK & ZED
***/****
written and directed by Jesse Blanchard

MAD GOD
****/****
starring Alex Cox
written and directed by Phil Tippett

by Walter Chaw William Blake etched the plates he used to press his poems with acid. His first books were hand-made by him in this way. He called it the “infernal method,” and the idea driving it is that every work of art is enlivened by the hand of its creator. Literally. He believed that touching a thing imbued it with animated qualities in the “soul-giving” sense of the word. I think about that whenever I watch any sort of puppetry or, as it relates to film more commonly, stop-motion animation. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think Blake had a point. I feel like there’s a specific quality of life in graven idols that have been directly manipulated by the human hand. Traditional cel animation? The same: the little imperfections, the stutters and hesitations that keep it just the other side of the Uncanny Valley. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is, but it’s stimulating in the same way a film projected on 35mm is ineffably different from the same film streamed digitally. Shadows on the wall and all that; maybe Plato and John Lennon had something there. William Blake was, of course, a prophet.

TIFF ’21: Dune

September 21, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, TIFF

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

Telluride ’21: The Lost Daughter

September 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Greece, Telluride

****/****
starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jessie Buckley
screenplay by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante
directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw Leda (Jessie Buckley) is brilliant. She's translating Auden into Italian and, more than just translating, she's interpreting the work in a way that's exciting to other scholars. She so impresses a hotshot in the field, one Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard), that he seduces her during a conference–or she seduces him, cheating on her milquetoast husband and two young daughters. She abandons all of them eventually. It's a decision that haunts her. At least it should, though she's not so sure it does. But that was a long time ago. Leda (Olivia Colman) is now 48, vacationing by herself on a tiny beachfront in Italy. These days, she's an English teacher of no particular renown looking for a small patch of ocean to float in, a small stretch of sand to lounge on, food when she's hungry, and a bed when she's tired. There's this other family, however, consisting of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who's struggling with a difficult child and a husband, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who looks like bad news. Though maybe not as bad-news as Toni's sister, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who, seven months pregnant, wants to take a swing at Leda when Leda refuses to give up her umbrella for Callie's birthday party. The cabana boy, Will (Paul Mescal), spots this and tells Leda he admires her for it but also warns her against doing it again. "Why?" she asks. "Because those are bad people." When she's walking home that afternoon, a large pine cone falls out of a tree and punches a small hole in Leda's back.

Telluride ’21: The Power of the Dog

September 14, 2021****/****, 2021, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, New Zealand, Romance, Streaming, Telluride, UK, Western

****/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee
written by Jane Campion, based on the novel by Thomas Savage
directed by Jane Campion

by Walter Chaw There is about Jane Campion’s work the air of the poet, and indeed there may be no better interpreter, translator, or adaptor of poetry than another poet. Her body of work is, to a one, in the thrall of the rapture of language: what words are capable of when arranged properly, powerfully. Campion demonstrates mastery of both what is spoken and what is seen, how words delivered with exquisite, just-so composition and deadly-true execution become, at the moment of their sublimation, images in the mind like witchcraft with no physical intervention in between. Music in the eye. Of all the easy and obvious examples in her work–the imagistic, rapturous biography of John Keats (Bright Star), the voice of the voiceless in The Piano, the shockingly immediate illumination of Kiwi author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table–the one that springs to mind most easily and often when I’m describing Campion’s work is the reaction of New York City English teacher Frankie, played by Meg Ryan, as she contemplates the words of Lorca printed on a literacy campaign poster in a subway car in Campion’s In the Cut. She looks upon them as a sinner looks upon the gallery of saints illuminated in the coloured windows of old cathedrals. Words are a rapture, a vehicle, and Campion, with her training as a painter, proves through the medium of film to be the premier painter of words. Loathe to make such pronouncements, I nonetheless spend most days thinking of Campion as my favourite living director and other days thinking of her as my favourite of all time. She is an artist.

The Green Knight (2021) + Pig (2021)

August 30, 2021****/****, 2021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, Ireland, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, VOD

THE GREEN KNIGHT
****/****
starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Ralph Nelson
written for the screen and directed by David Lowery

PIG
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
written and directed by Michael Sarnoski

by Walter Chaw A thing has no value if there is no risk of losing it. A treasure is only that if there are hobbits. If you’re a parent and you’ve done everything right, and everything goes exactly as it should, your children will know the exquisite pain of your death. The story for us all ideally has the tang of misadventure to it and a sad ending full of irony. It is a great fable without a moral, wrought with temptations–though hopefully, when the curtain falls, free of too much regret. The key to navigating the labyrinth of the Rose Poet’s medieval romance “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is perhaps in its prologue, where it presents the history of the founding of England from the Fall of Troy through to Aeneas’s further stories: his conquests and foundings, sure, but also the inevitable decline of his line. A popular version of this history around the time that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” would have been written holds that Brutus of Troy is the grandson of Aeneas, exiled from Italy because, in fulfillment of a prophecy similar to the one that doomed Oedipus, he accidentally killed his father with an errant arrow. In the course of his wanderings, this Brute, the product of a cursed line beset with hubris and tragic folly, becomes the first king of what would be called England.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

August 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn’t have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It’s so good because it’s so…simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that’s kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Hotel Poseidon

August 15, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director’s fever dream, Stef Lernous’s Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro’s City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we’re all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It’s not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch’s work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious–a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

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:

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

July 11, 2021****/****, 1980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, UK, War

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer It’s obvious from the beginning that Stanley Kubrick loves R. Lee Ermey. Loves him. Though Ermey is only the fourth-billed actor in Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman may as well be the star of the show. He’s described in Gustav Hasford’s source novel as “an obscene little ogre in immaculate khaki.” His barked insults and obscenities dominate the first section of the film–a tour de force showing how Hartman wears down (and, supposedly, toughens up) a barracksful of U.S. Marine draftees, blasting away at their natural aversion to aggression and reprogramming them as soldiers. Kubrick was lucky to find him; a Vietnam War vet and former Marine Corps drill instructor, Ermey brings an irresistible combination of outrageousness and authenticity to the part. Hartman could have come across as an unlikely caricature but for Ermey’s ferociousness.

Indiana Jones: 4-Movie Collection – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

July 4, 2021****/****, 1980s, 2000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs. Click any image to enlarge.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bryant Frazer Paramount has reissued the first four Indiana Jones films on 4K UHD disc in a box set with vouchers for digital copies of the tetralogy. (For a detailed review of the movies proper as well as their 2012 Blu-ray counterparts, our own Walter Chaw has you covered. (The star ratings above are his, the letter grades are mine.)) The new 4K scans capture the camera negatives in all their Panavision glory. Grain is quite present and the image sometimes goes a wee bit soft, especially in shots that were optically printed (i.e., titles, dissolves, wipes, and the like), but it’s never inappropriate or distracting, and I didn’t notice any obvious compression-induced flaws. Many of the special-effects shots look better than ever, as the original elements have been recomposited digitally to fix thick matte lines, imprecise rotoscopes, and similar technical holdovers from the analog domain.

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2021)

June 23, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Vampire

****/****
starring Patrick Fugit, Ingrid Sophie Schram, Owen Campbell
written and directed by Jonathan Cuartas

by Walter Chaw The reason Dwight (Patrick Fugit) goes to diners is to eat a little toast, drink some coffee, and listen to other people go about their lives. His sister, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), waits tables at one where she suffers the indignities of the service industry with pallid, resigned despair. Between them, the extent to which they can empathize with people beyond their bubble will drive their existence to a crisis. Cut from the same cloth as Jim Mickle’s exceptional We Are What We Are and destined to be compared to Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (hereafter My Heart), the hyphenate debut of Jonathan Cuartas, finds its closest analogue in Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, which is similarly about the brutal banality and biological horror of caring for a terminally-ill loved one. Dwight and Jessie look after their brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell–so good in Super Dark Times), who needs to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burns him badly and instantly. Well into puberty, he still acts like a child–not for any sort of mental disability, but rather, we surmise, because of a lifetime spent in a handful of the same rooms, his brother and sister as his sole companions.

Lisa (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 20, 2021****/****, 1990s, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Horror, Teen, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Cheryl Ladd, D.W. Moffet, Staci Keanan, Tanya Fenmore
written by Gary Sherman & Karen Clark
directed by Gary Sherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s cheesy, right? He stakes out beautiful women, breaks into their apartment while they’re out, and decorates their place with enough candles for a Meat Loaf video. When they return home and check their messages, they hear one from him: “Hi, this is Richard. I’m in your apartment. I’m going to kill you.” Then he pounces, doing exactly what he promised to do. I went to see Gary Sherman’s Lisa with a friend on opening weekend in May of 1990; we had planned on going to Ernest Goes to Jail but were late for the matinee. We were late for everything, in fact, except Lisa, and the only competition for a seat was the tumbleweeds–a reflection of the skeletal marketing budget and maybe Siskel & Ebert’s downcast thumbs. Anyway, my buddy and me, both 15 at the time, were snorting derisively at Richard’s M.O.–the media has christened him, ooh, the Candlelight Killer–as Lisa got underway, mainly because it involved the type of aesthetic jive we put up with for a flash of nipple on late-night cable. (Did I mention the saxophone music?) Then came the introduction of the title character, a 14-year-old girl who lives with her florist mother Katherine in a cozy little womb of a loft, and any residual laughter took on a nervous edge. Safe to say that Scooby-Doo-ish frisson of siccing a sociopath on the territory of Apple Paperbacks worked like a charm: We were on tenterhooks for the next 90 minutes or so, like air-traffic controllers monitoring the progress of Lisa and Richard’s inevitable, inexorable collision.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

March 19, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Superhero

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It opens with soundwaves visualized as ripples in the air–Superman’s (Henry Cavill) death cry touching every part of a blasted world as the protection and decency he represents is murdered. I have historically hated Zack Snyder’s vision of this universe because it felt grimdark in a weightless way, the posturing of an emo teenager who hasn’t earned his weariness and cynicism. It felt like a put-on. Immature. When the worst parts of comic fandom coalesced to demand a director’s cut of a genuinely abominable film, Justice League, I, partly out of self-protection from a hateful horde and partly out of a sense of moral superiority, looked upon the project as first impossible, then misguided. I thought myself better than all this, which is unforgivable. I guess I wanted to believe that in a world in which I have figured nothing out, I had at least figured out that anything championed by trolls and incels could have no possible value to someone like me–who, of course, has nothing in common with these troglodytes except, you know, for the loneliness and the self-loathing and the suspicion of corporate-think. Maybe it’s just fear that makes me as hateful as they are. And maybe it’s just fear that makes them as hateful as they are, too. I think what’s most surprising to me about Zack Snyder’s Justice League (hereafter ZSJL) is how skillful it is as a diagnosis of the horrific, unfillable void that drives the very population most responsible for its existence. If the messages of the film are internalized, it may even help.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

March 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, VOD

****/****
screenplay by Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim
directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

by Walter Chaw I’ve thought a lot lately about quitting, and seriously, this thing I’ve done over the last twenty-some years–this thing that started, ultimately, because I was a kid who couldn’t speak the language and wanted desperately to belong to something that would never have me on my terms. I’ve thought about quitting, and it’s a dangerous thing for someone like me to think that way. Movies were a thing I loved that never betrayed me, never abandoned me, whenever there was pain or confusion, or something I needed to work through; this was the art form that was primary for me as a catalyst for introspection. There’s literature and music and poetry, of course, yet film could encompass all of those things. It’s saved my life a time or two. I thought I had a place among others who loved it like me, but no one loves it like me–people love it like they love it. Or they just use it because they’ve failed at everything else and don’t have the introspection to feel despair. When you give yourself over to an idea of affiliation through the appreciation of objects, you’re doomed to disappointment and loneliness. When a person like me thinks about quitting, he’s thinking about cutting the line that connects him to his life. I’ve been thinking about quitting, because what’s the point of any of it when your rope is tied to a quintessence of dust? I don’t trust this anymore.