Adventure Archives - Page 6 of 40

Captain Marvel (2019)

March 5, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law
screenplay by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck & Geneva Robertson-Dworet
directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

by Walter Chaw Brie Larson wished aloud for more diversity in the press covering Captain Marvel, and that, combined with the fact that Larson or anyone who looks remotely like her is clearly never going to sleep with them, caused any number of mediocre men to cry and bully the tedious things mediocre men cry and bully. When we talk about "ratios" in popular culture now, we're referring to the number of comments stupid "tweets" get in relation to the number of "likes" they receive–the dumber you are, the more comments you get telling you so. The other "ratio" germane to this conversation is the one provided by cultural anthropology, particularly Dr. Donald Symons, who proposes that the ratio between the most reproductively-successful woman and the least reproductively-successful woman is, you know, in the teens, while the ratio between the most reproductively-successful man (thousands) and the least (zero) is…well, there is no percentage. Anything divided by zero is nonsense.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

February 4, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/****
starring Rosa Salazar, Mahershala Ali, Eiza González, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, based on the manga series "Gunnm" by Yukito Kishiro
directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw There's one genuinely good thing about Alita: Battle Angel and it has to do with a cameo by Jeff Fahey as a guy who really likes dogs. It's good because it's good to like dogs, but it also reminds of Fahey's villain from Silverado, who has a pretty great line about a dog; and it's good to be reminded of Silverado. In other words, the one genuinely good thing about Alita is there's something in it that, on purpose, reminds me of a good movie. The rest of it is noisy juvenilia taking place in the Sharkboy and Lavagirl universe–a YA disaster featuring the usual mysterious girl with the secret past who turns out to be a super-soldier and yadda yadda yadda. Jesus, does it break no new ground. Scrapper-cum-cyborg-engineer-slash-bounty-hunter Ido (Christoph Waltz, desperately hoping QT picks up the phone again) discovers the "core" of Alita (voiced and mo-capped by Rosa Salazar), basically her Victorian locket-silhouette parts, in the junkyard of a floating city housing the elites of this world ("300 YEARS AFTER THE FALL") and immediately grafts it to his dead daughter's unused robot body, because in addition to the movie being structurally unambitious and curiously sexist, it's also defiantly ableist. "I made her fast little legs," Ido says, mournfully, and then we get a flashback to the dead little girl being punched out of her wheelchair by a cyborg Ido created to compete in a future-game called "Rollerball"–I mean, "Murderskates." I don't know. Who cares. It's on roller skates and cyborgs do it. Oh, and they kill a dog.

First Blood (1982); Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); Rambo III 4K (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 17, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Revenge, Stallone

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

FIRST BLOOD
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos

RAMBO III
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
written by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald

“Hate war, but love the American warrior.”
-Lt. Gen. Hal Moore

by Bill Chambers I suppose I said it all in my previous review, but that was some sixteen years ago, and my feelings on the original Rambo trilogy have changed somewhat since then. I attribute this to age (if not maturity), evolving cultural attitudes, and 2008’s Rambo (hereafter Rambo IV), Sylvester Stallone’s powerful reclaiming of the character from the clutches of self-parody and blockbuster bloat. Rambo IV is essentially a stripped-down redux combining elements of the first three films; that there’s nothing particularly innovative about its plot isn’t, however, a commercial concession–what fans were really left to pander to, 20 years after Rambo III fizzled at the domestic box-office?–so much as it’s part and parcel of the movie’s thesis that Rambo’s singular talent for warfare, a blessing and a curse, will never be wasted in a world as shitty as ours. No matter how often or how hard he tries to drop off the grid. There’s a moment in Rambo IV where we hear his interior monologue as he forges himself a new blade: “War is in your blood,” he says. “When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.” The tragic weight of these words ripples backwards across the franchise upon revisitation. For the lesser entries (the second and third films), I’d say it now counts among their redeeming qualities.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 4, 2019****/****, 1960s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

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

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer In 1965, film director Stanley Kubrick and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke embarked on a remarkable collaboration. Taking an old Clarke short story as their starting point, the duo rewrote it and dramatically expanded its scope, drafting the blueprint for a film to be directed by Kubrick as well as for a novel to be scripted by Clarke. In Clarke’s original story, “The Sentinel”, astronauts found an ancient artifact on the moon that functioned as a radio beacon, transmitting signals into outer space. The expanded film treatment was many times more ambitious, beginning in the deep pre-history of human evolution and climaxing with a futuristic journey to Jupiter, where one man confronts an unseen alien intelligence–and undergoes transformation and rebirth. More than a science-fiction thriller or space-bound adventure movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a meditation on Man’s place in the universe that mounts a convincing argument that the sum total of human knowledge gathered over the millennia is insignificant, at best, when compared to the vast mysteries of the greater universe. That sense of scale is demonstrated, vividly, in a climactic sequence that uses colour and sound to depict a wild journey into–a distant realm? Another dimension? A new plane of human existence?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

December 12, 2018****/****, 2018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical

Spidermanintothespiderverse

****/****
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It's American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it's breathtaking. More than kinetic, it's alive. And more than just alive, it's seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett's quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It's a manifestation of optimism. There's hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don't, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there's a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he's proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It's perfect.

Aquaman (2018)

December 12, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Aquaman

***½/****
starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beal
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw I don’t think the DCEU was done any favours by the success of Christopher Nolan’s exceptional Dark Knight trilogy, charting as it did a course of “grittiness” and topical social relevance that made the examination of its heroes’ subconscious motivations the text rather than the middle to be teased out by generations of readers. When nerd culture took the bully pulpit, in many ways it took the mantle of being a bully, too. There is literally no way to review a comic-book movie without getting death threats: woe be to you if you don’t like it–but if you do like it, you’re probably not liking it in the right way. Making lockers to be pushed into virtual didn’t, apparently, solve the problem of being a mediocre male looking to express dominance. There’s a connection here to why comic-book movies about the troubles of sad white people are less and less current, while stuff like Black Panther, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, and Wonder Woman are the tantalizing hope for a positive future. No accident that minority and marginalized filmmakers have found a way forward with this genre.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

December 5, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller, Tom Cruise

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw As the title flatly states, Mission: Impossible: Fallout (hereafter Fallout), the sixth instalment in our very own Jackie Chan’s signature series, will be about Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) emotional baggage, earned over twenty-plus years of saving the world from threats foreign, domestic, and auteur. The main personal casualty for Hunt is the disintegration of his marriage to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who must remain a “ghost” so that she doesn’t suffer the, yes, fallout from Ethan’s hero work. She checks in every once in a while, Hunt’s teammate Luther (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan’s new flame, former MI6 agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). It’s what keeps Ethan going. Accordingly, Fallout starts with an apocalyptic dream of Julia in the hands of maddog terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)–the type of dream James Cameron used so effectively in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where everyone turns to charcoal and flies apart. It’s important to focus in on all of this because Fallout is about a very specific element of the myth of masculinity, this romanticizing of sacrifice and suffering that men must go through in order to protect the women in their lives. The best part of Martin Campbell’s extremely good Casino Royale is when fatale Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) brings Bond (Daniel Craig) back from the dead and his first sentence is spent asking if she’s okay. There’s a scene like that at the end of Fallout as well when Hunt, back from the dead, apologizes to Julia for everything. It’s the sentiment and the situation that makes men in the audience spring a manly leak. Hunt–even his name is a primordial gender assignation–is the avatar for male expectation, which casts his heroics in an odd light, I think: fantasies of male heroism played against grandiose, extravagant, paranoid delusions. I don’t know now if I’m talking about Cruise or Hunt. Same, same.

Rampage (2018) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

November 27, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
screenplay by Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel
directed by Brad Peyton

by Walter Chaw Silent Hill is still the best video-game movie, but points awarded to Brad Peyton for taking a flyer at adapting an old side-scrolling punchfest and giving it a standard sub-genre narrative. Rampage is the same kind, if not the same quality, of adaptation as the first Pirates of the Caribbean: an idea that makes no sense on paper that’s unexpectedly decent in execution. Anyway, Rampage is the standard eco-horror conceit of evil scientists trying to engineer something evil for the military-industrial complex, which underestimates the controllability (and the evil) of the thing they’re trying to make and thus endanger a lot of people/the world with their greed/godless curiosity. On the other side, there’s beefy primatologist Davis (Dwayne Johnson, reuniting with San Andreas helmer Peyton) and a disgraced, formerly corrupt scientist named Dr. Kate (Naomie Harris), who enter into an uneasy partnership with government spook Agent Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to counteract the Frankenstein that’s been unleashed. Said Frankenstein being a growth agent or something that causes a wolf, an alligator, and Davis’s best friend, George, an albino gorilla, to grow to gargantuan proportions–and become nigh invulnerable, to boot. Fans of the arcade game will note that this is faithful casting; they will also recognize the building-punching and helicopter-biting.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) [Cinematic Universe Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

November 25, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

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

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Michael Douglas
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Paul Rudd & Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari
directed by Peyton Reed

by Bryant Frazer Ant-Man and the Wasp opens, like Ant-Man before it, inside Uncanny Valley, with one of those flashback scenes haunted by creepy, de-aged CG replicas of famous actors. Less than 40 seconds into the film, Cartoon Robot Michelle Pfeiffer widens and rolls her eyes in an unsettling, overdetermined gesture that feels no less artificial even if it’s sourced from Pfeiffer’s “real” work in front of a performance-capture camera. It’s not just that CRMP’s eyeballs seem so much more active than those of every other actor in the film–that could be put down to her individual style of emoting–but more that they don’t quite sync up with the rest of her face. Sure, as crimes against nature go this one is minor; the similarly de-eldered Creepy Zombie Michael Douglas looming behind her is more distracting, with a deader face. Still, it’s an unforced error. Why go to these lengths? CRMP’s presence is barely required in the film; in most of her scenes, she’s already wearing a mask. And the scene offers no crucial information or insight.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

November 5, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany
written by Jonathan Kasdan & Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In Roger Ebert’s reviews of the original Star Wars trilogy, he mentions that one of the wonders of this universe is that the droids are thinking, feeling, emotional beings, thus making their torture in Return of the Jedi a visceral thing. In Ron Howard’s expediently-extruded Solo: A Star Wars Story (hereafter Solo), a sassy robot named L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is fused into the Millennium Falcon spacecraft after being murdered in the middle of a slave and prisoner rebellion she’s incited in another interchangeable industrial backwater. I mention this as a point of interest because L3 is the clumsy mouthpiece for broad progressive beliefs in a shockingly bad script by father-son duo Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. When Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) asks if there’s anything else he can get her as he’s leaving a room, she says, “Equal rights?” It’s that kind of character. The kind usually workshopped out when the screenwriter–one of them, anyway–isn’t the most powerful person in the room. She’s Dobby the House Elf from a storyline smartly left out of the film adaptations of Harry Potter, screaming about “droid rights” during a droid Thunderdome sequence done better in everything (but particularly in A.I.), and there mainly I think so that replacement director Howard can slide his brother Clint into a self-satisfied cameo. So this character, liberating droids and releasing slaves and declaring that she’s found her calling, is fused by a grieving Lando into his spaceship to spend the next eight or nine movies getting punched and abused by her new white masters whenever she doesn’t work right away.

TIFF ’18: High Life

September 19, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Poland, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Geoff Cox
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda If you took Twitter's word for it after the gala premiere of Claire Denis's High Life, which was apparently conceived in an off-the-cuff conversation with Vincent Gallo about life at the end of the world and briefly tinkered-with in the earliest days of its inception by Zadie Smith, you'd think the singular French filmmaker abandoned all her instincts to make an edgy sci-fi sex farce with the dildo chair from Burn After Reading. What a relief, then, to discover that High Life is indeed a Claire Denis film. A step removed from the spoiler-saturated breathlessness of the first hot takes, one finds something every bit as rattled and mournful a late work as Paul Schrader's First Reformed, and, like Trouble Every Day, no less structurally elusive or visceral than the rest of her oeuvre for being a work of genre.

The Predator (2018)

September 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key
written by Fred Dekker & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black's The Predator is about cultures built around, predicated upon, and interested in the deification of violence and dominance. It talks about how an entire alien civilization owes its technical and biological evolution to the refinement of tools used explicitly on big game, not unlike how our own technologies owe their evolution to porn and forever war. One running joke has a scientist–an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn), natch–saying that the things aren't so much "predators" as they are sports trophy hunters, like bass fishermen, say, but of course calling them "predators" is "cooler." All the men in the room agree. The only ones who don't are the woman and a suicidal black soldier (Trevante Rhodes)–not coincidentally, the characters most likely to be predated upon (woman, black, mentally-ill, even veterans) by their own culture. Being in a life-and-death struggle with a predator is cool because it's a question of survival for both; being the victim of one of Donald Trump's inbred children is not cool because it's some rich douchenozzle armed to the teeth hunting you for something to mount in the den of their third mistress's second winter home. The Predator, in other words, has much on its mind, despite that its execution is a trainwreck–a trainwreck overwhelmed by an eve-of-premiere scandal whereby Munn revealed that Black had enlisted one of his buddies, a convicted pederast, to play a scene with Munn as a perv who harasses her while jogging, without informing the production of his past. The layers of irony to this thing are like unpacking an onion.

FrightFest ’18: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot

August 26, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest

*½/**** written and directed by Robert D. Krzykowski by Walter Chaw Sort of like The Age of Adeline where the gimmick isn't immortality, but rather a guy who killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot, Robert D. Krzykowski's The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is ultimately an elegy for a certain kind of heroism embodied by Sam Elliott, arguably the only actor who could perform the high-wire act of this high-concept movie. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot has a definite Bubba Ho-Tep vibe, especially in the moments where it uses a sting like Bill…

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

July 28, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

June 23, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by J.A. Bayona

by Walter Chaw The first time I remember seeing the news crawl at the bottom of a TV screen used as a satirical device in a film was in Jonathan Demme’s still-exceptional, suddenly-current remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (hereafter Fallen Kingdom), after a grim opening sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film, a news ticker declares that the “U.S. President” questions the existence of dinosaurs in the first place. It’s a well-placed barb in the flank of the white evangelical monster that’s swallowed the United States in a dystopia founded on equal parts massive ignorance and fear of an angry white god–one that has installed a demented con-man, and possibly the worst human being in a country teeming with bad human beings, as its golden calf. Hidden away in this pricey fifth instalment of a billion-dollar franchise is a Spanish Gothic fairytale of the titular “fallen kingdom”–the United States, n’est-ce pas?–that owes a lot more to Bayona’s debut The Orphanage than to any of the previous films in the Jurassic series. It plays like Cronos, and it serves the same immediate function as George Romero’s Day of the Dead, up to porting over the “Bub” subplot on the back of a sentient dino named “Blue.” Where its immediate predecessor was a misogynistic funhouse paced to the story/action structure of a porno, Fallen Kingdom is stately to the point of reserved; immensely weird; and overtly critical of the current state of affairs. I’m not sure it’s a good dinosaur movie, but it’s an angry, swollen-red metaphor. All things being equal, I guess I’ll take angry.

Incredibles 2 (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Around the midpoint of Brad Bird’s fantastic Incredibles 2, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) catches his son Dash (Huck Milner) on Dash’s way to the bus and pointedly tucks his homework in his backpack. Yes. This happens. This happens every day of the school-year with my 11-year-old son, who is bright, funny, and kind, and can’t for the life of him remember to put his completed homework in his freaking backpack. There are dozens of moments in Incredibles 2 like this. They’re small, throwaway character bits that would’ve taken hours or days to animate and voice correctly, and the real thrill of a movie like this–of any Pixar or Miyazaki when they’re clicking–is little moments like these. In Princess Mononoke, for instance, the prince crouches to take a drink from a stream, but before he does so, he loops his bow over his head and under his arm in a completely natural gesture that would be invisible but for its meaningful utility: this guy has spent a lot of time in the woods, drinking from springs and using his bow. It’s biography conveyed almost subliminally in under a second. In Incredibles 2, a breathless Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) calls from a hotel room upon getting “reinstated” as a superhero in this universe where being super is illegal, after which she bursts excitedly into the story of her day while stay-at-home dad Mr. Incredible makes the right noises and turns on the television. The film is wise to cultural/gender issues that can arise when the woman is the breadwinner; to teen girls in daughter Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) efforts to get a boy to notice her (I have a teen girl, too; it’s spot on); and to an American’s unique social programming, which says that anyone can be anything through the power of belief and effort. Not for nothing, the villain of the first film is the manifestation of toxic fandom in the schlubby body of a white guy calling/diagnosing himself “Syndrome.”

A Wrinkle in Time (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 6, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine
screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle
directed by Ava DuVernay

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Lights, another, much better film featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (directed by another woman of colour, Gina Prince-Bythewood), there is a moment where her character decides to un-straighten her hair and own who she is, damn the torpedoes, and it lands like what a revolution feels like. Or, at least, it lands like what a personal epiphany feels like. In Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, a little white boy named Calvin (Pan‘s Levi Miller), with whom heroine Meg (Storm Reid) is creepily smitten, tells her, twice (twice), that he likes her hair, getting an awkward brush off the first time and a shy “thanks” the second. This is what passes for empowerment in a film fixated on empowerment. I think it’s probably a mistake to have Meg’s sense of self-worth hinge on the approval–at least in this cultural moment–of a white dude. There are fraught politics around a black woman’s hair, and A Wrinkle In Time uses it as a cruel tease again when there’s talk by the evil IT (voiced by David Oyelowo) of Meg straightening her locks before being presented with a “perfect” doppelgänger, free of her nerd glasses, glammed up, hair un-kinked, as one possible outcome for her. It’s the key visual metaphor in a film garnering some measure of praise mainly for how it’s not for anyone who is “cynical” (or an adult). That, and its visual audacity–which in any other context would be derided for its overreliance on the same, along with the picture’s anachronistic amateurishness. Turning Reese Witherspoon into a smug piece of salad is probably not the best use of all those millions of dollars.

The 39 Steps (1935) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 22, 2018****/****, 1930s, 2018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Manheim, Godfrey Tearle
adaptation by Charles Bennett, dialogue by Ian Hay, based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Following the success of 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock and his once-inseparable screenwriter Charles Bennett took to adapting John Buchan’s 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps as a breathless, sometimes-madcap chase flick employing a MacGuffin of many possibilities. The picture opens at the vaudeville act of one Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson): ask him a question and he’ll answer it–a human search engine and the centre of a film dealing with the very Hitchcockian theme of performance and how it keeps at bay, uneasily, the teeming chaos beneath the surface. In the middle of his act, a gunshot rings out and the audience, already unruly, crushes for the exits. Men first, old women–one in particular–trampled in the panic. Hitchcock’s cosmology is aligned with Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” suspended as it were above anarchy and animalism by the thinnest of agreements among men to engage in civilization. I don’t think Hitchcock disdains order–I think he mistrusts it. It’s the root of his Wrong Man issues, no less despairing in its fatalism than Edgar Allan Poe’s expectation/fear of premature burial. The critic Howie Movshovitz gave perhaps the best, certainly the most succinct, summary of Hitchcock’s world of Catholic transference and Original Sin: “Everyone’s got it coming.”

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

May 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

*/****
starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany
written by Jonathan Kasdan & Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In Roger Ebert’s reviews of the original Star Wars trilogy, he mentions that one of the wonders of this universe is that the droids are thinking, feeling, emotional beings, thus making their torture in Return of the Jedi a visceral thing. In Ron Howard’s expediently-extruded Solo: A Star Wars Story (hereafter Solo), a sassy robot named L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is fused into the Millennium Falcon spacecraft after being murdered in the middle of a slave and prisoner rebellion she’s incited in another interchangeable industrial backwater. I mention this as a point of interest because L3 is the clumsy mouthpiece for broad progressive beliefs in a shockingly-bad script by father-son duo Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. When Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) asks if there’s anything else he can get her as he’s leaving a room, she says, “Equal rights?” It’s that kind of character. The kind usually workshopped out when the screenwriter–one of them, anyway–isn’t the most powerful person in the room. She’s Dobby the House Elf from a storyline smartly left out of the film adaptations of Harry Potter, screaming about “droid rights” during a droid Thunderdome sequence done better in everything (but particularly in A.I.), and there mainly I think so that replacement director Howard can slide his brother Clint into a self-satisfied cameo. So this character, liberating droids and releasing slaves and declaring that she’s found her calling, is fused by a grieving Lando into his spaceship to spend the next eight or nine movies getting punched and abused by her new white masters whenever she doesn’t work right away.

Black Panther (2018) [Cinematic Universe Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

May 15, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis
written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw There are issues Black Panther raises that I’m not equipped to discuss. I don’t understand them. I do understand that its closest analogues are Wonder Woman and Rogue One, in that these are deeply flawed films that, for particular audiences, hold a near-totemic value as representative artifacts. I can’t possibly express the joy and immense satisfaction I felt seeing Asian faces in a Star Wars film. I can’t possibly share in the same joy and sense of satisfaction that women got from Wonder Woman and that African-Americans will likely experience with Black Panther. They are all three films that you only really dislike from a position of privilege, and such is the conundrum of our current discourse. I will say that there are a handful of scenes in Black Panther that are as powerful statements of racial outrage as anything I’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema–that is, in a film that is not otherwise directly about slavery and the African-American experience. During its prologue/creation myth, I gasped at a scene of slaves, chained together, being led onto a slaver’s galley. There are moments so bold (if not reductive) that they’re genuinely breathtaking in their audacious impoliteness. Bold enough that some of my more conservative peers left the screening soon after a particular pronouncement about the legacy of slavery poisoning race relations into the modern day. At the end of it, a character proclaims they’d rather die than live in chains. It couldn’t get balder than that, nor more revolutionary. Yeah, man.