Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

SlipStreams Vol. 16 (Patreon exclusive)

March 20, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Patreon, SlipStreams

Three random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL editor Bill Chambers for the week of March 22, 2024. PICK OF THE WEEK Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007, d. Sidney Lumet (U.S.: Fubo, Peacock, Roku, Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, Crackle, Pluto, Shout!, Plex; Canada: Prime, Tubi, CTV))Sidney Lumet's swan song brought the prolific director's career to a sudden stop; he lived another four years, making Before the Devil Knows You're Dead feel like a purposeful valediction with surprisingly little positive to say about his time on Earth. He was an old lib in the throes of Bush II, and this…

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

January 30, 20242023, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, 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 Holdovers (2023) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

January 9, 2024****/****, 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.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

November 3, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Thriller, Tom Cruise

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

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 22, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror

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

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy
based on the novel by Ira Levin
written for the screen and directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw Rosemary is everything. He’s just Guy. It’s that tension–between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table–that serves as the tightrope in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. As portrayed by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is precious and flawed, full of life and surrounded by death. She is the venerated object, the cathedral she imagines the night she’s drugged and violated; the most precious thing, the sanctified earth planted with the pestilential corruption of masculine ambition. Rosemary’s Baby opens with a lengthy consideration of the buildings that surround Central Park like vultures in their priestly black, voracious and solemn, gathered around a carcass that is, in this configuration, the sole hint of life in a metal savannah. Polanski is a genius of architecture and the consideration of it. His spaces are predatory, or at least become so: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” and the apartment that sprouts hands from its walls and, here in Rosemary’s Baby, the “Black Bramford.” He puts pretty blondes into the maw of his constructions–sacrifices to the Minotaur wandering through his Labyrinth–and watches them get swallowed by the Stygian black. He is the Minotaur. The pitch is his, along with the appetites. Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest films about what women endure in a world that sees them as seed incubators, nesting fowl, and finally trophies: meek and pretty. But Rosemary isn’t meek, simply outmatched, surrounded, flanked by the men she’s supposed to be able to trust.

TIFF ’23: Seagrass

September 28, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ally Maki, Luke Roberts, Nyha Breitkreuz, Chris Pang
written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown

by Bill Chambers I always brace for gloom when out come the tiny title fonts–in Canada, they’re the cinematic equivalent of a funeral director solemnly gesturing towards the casket–but Meredith Hama-Brown’s FIPRESCI-winning Seagrass quickly dispelled my cynicism by being so obviously good. Judith (Ally Maki) and Steve (Luke Roberts) are a mixed-race couple with two young daughters, 11-year-old Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz) and six-year-old Emmy (Remy Marthaller). Theirs is a troubled marriage, complicated by the recent death of Judith’s mother, and so they’ve travelled with the kids to a couples retreat on the Pacific coast for therapy and respite. There, they meet their mirror image in Pat (Chris Pang) and Carol (Sarah Gadon), handsome marrieds who appear to be farther along in their reconciliation. (Either that, or they’re better at presenting a united front.) Judith regards Pat with undeniable yet enigmatic interest and Steve picks up on it, creating a lopsided tension between the two men. But gradually, from the nature of Judith’s complaints about Steve–how he never wants to go anywhere exotic; how he doesn’t seem to appreciate the depths of her grief, or comprehend her nostalgia for a childhood that sounds like it was mired in hardship–it becomes clear that whatever her physical attraction to Pat, he’s thrown Steve’s whiteness and all that that implies into stark relief. (Because it’s set in the 1990s, unenlightened Steve falls easily into syllogistic traps like asking how he could be a racist when he has a Japanese wife, while Judith lacks the language of rebuttal.) She looks at Pat and wonders, perhaps, if an Asian partner would make her feel less conspicuous. Less ashamed. Less alone.

TIFF ’23: Sleep + Smugglers

September 18, 20232023, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF

SLEEP
Jam
**/****
starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
written and directed by Jason Yu

SMUGGLERS
Milsu
***/****
starring Kim Hye-soo, Yum Jung-ah, Park Jeong-min, Zo In-sung
screenplay by Ryoo Seung-wan, Kim Jeong-yeon
directed by Ryoo Seung-wan

by Bill Chambers Jason Yu’s Sleep had me at hello. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a young couple expecting their first child. One night, out of the blue, Hyun-Su starts talking in his sleep. “Someone’s inside,” he says. Soo-jin wonders if he’s trying to tell her something. It’s the opening scene of Poltergeist with considerably less grandeur, but horror, like punk, thrives in lo-fi. (The movie’s biggest formal swing is to instantaneously alter the mood of a scene through jump cuts or abrupt lighting changes.) Though Hyun-Su has no memory of the incident, he thinks he knows why he said what he said: because he’s an actor and one of the lines he has in his current project is, “Someone’s inside the building.” It’s enough to placate Soo-jin until the following night, when he dozes off and…well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Soon, bedtime becomes a jack-in-the-box full of nasty surprises that have Soo-jin sleeping with one eye open. A doctor gives Hyun-su what would be very practical and hopeful advice for someone suffering from an actual sleep disorder, but is that what’s going on? Or is something supernatural waiting until he lies down at night to use him as a marionette? And what, if anything, do the new downstairs neighbours, a single mother and her adolescent son, have to do with his condition?

TIFF ’23: I Don’t Know Who You Are

September 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Chaplin, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Mark Clennon, Anthony Diaz, Nat Manuel, Michael Hogan
written and directed by M.H. Murray

by Bill Chambers Toronto scenester Benjamin (Mark Clennon) is a young, Black artist and musician getting his groove back after breaking up with his boyfriend and performing partner, Oscar (Kevin A. Courtney). He’s a sweetheart, the sort of guy who sends what little spending money he has back home to his mother and makes ends meet giving music lessons to kids and empty-nesters around the neighbourhood. He’s also a bit of a raw nerve: When his friend Ariel (Nat Manuel) teases him for not having slept with current beau Malcolm (Anthony Diaz) yet, she unwittingly sets off his insecurities about Malcolm’s desire to take things slow. So begins a Friday night of heavy drinking that finds Benjamin running into Oscar, who’s settled into a new relationship with ease. At first, then, it’s a cheap boost to Benjamin’s ego when a stranger (Michael Hogan) starts hitting on him on the way home, but soon the stranger’s predatory intentions come into stark relief and Benjamin, too rubbery from wine to fight him off, is raped. The next day, instead of calling the police, going to the ER, or confiding in friends, Benjamin does something that feels psychologically acute in its irrationality and starts cleaning the fridge. I Don’t Know Who You Are is at its best in these moments that defy exposition, and in fact there’s an entire other movie happening, unspoken, about what, exactly, Benjamin’s race means within his obviously inclusive but conspicuously white inner circle. One friend describes him as “our jukebox,” which maybe isn’t the compliment they think it is. (Benjamin points out that, unlike him, jukeboxes get paid.) His rapist is white, too, incidentally–and billed as “The Man.”

TIFF ’23: The Teachers’ Lounge

September 9, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

Das Lehrerzimmer
***/****
starring Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer
screenplay by Ilker Çatak, Johannes Duncker
directed by Ilker Çatak

by Bill Chambers At first, I thought the form of The Teachers’ Lounge might be too classically sedate for a quasi-thriller with the dyspeptic energy of an Uncut Gems, but as elementary-school teacher Carla Nowak, a young idealist who’s hyperconscious of power imbalances (a Polish immigrant at a German school, she’s the kind of person who doesn’t like speaking her native tongue with another Polish teacher because it alienates their colleagues), Leonie Benesch is so keyed-up she’s practically an aesthetic unto herself. After a teacher is pickpocketed at school, presumably by a student, Ms. Nowak’s first priority isn’t to the faculty: She doesn’t like that the kids are being encouraged to rat on their own and bristles at the racial profiling of one of her sixth-graders when he’s singled out for having a large sum of money in his wallet. Later, she thinks she’s caught the real thief on camera, long-time receptionist Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), whose son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in her class. She confronts the woman in private with every intention of letting her off the hook, but she underestimates the gulf between them in terms of age vs. experience, perhaps, or teachers vs. clerical staff, or spinsterhood vs. working single-motherhood, and Ms. Kuhn’s indignant reaction scorches the earth, forcing Ms. Nowak’s hand. When Ms. Kuhn is put on leave, Oskar tries to pay his mother’s tab with his meagre savings, but the debt, of course, has ballooned past any dollar amount. He demands she make some sort of retraction to clear his mother’s name. Again, not that simple, and it probably wouldn’t do any good, though he’s adamant: “You will apologize in public or you’ll suffer the consequences.”

Roman Holiday (1953) [Centennial Collection] – DVD|[70th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

August 22, 20231950s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Romance

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

***½/****
DVD – Image B- Sound B Extras C
4K UHD – Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power
screenplay by Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton
directed by William Wyler

by Walter Chaw It’s one of those seminal moments that movies provide the culture with now and again, like the swoop up a little rise to an impossibly fresh John Wayne in Stagecoach, or the intervention of a fortuitous steam vent in The Seven Year Itch, this introduction we have to Audrey Hepburn as she’s whirled around in a barber chair in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday to reveal the pixie-cut heard ’round the world. That she’s adorable is a given–the real issue is whether she’s an actress or just a bundle of inexplicable charisma, a ganglion of celluloid starlight that evaporates under the slightest critical scrutiny. I love Roman Holiday, but I vacillate between indifference and actual dislike of the rest of Hepburn’s films. I don’t find her winsome in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, am irritated by her in Charade, think she’s appallingly twee in Love in the Afternoon. She doesn’t hold her own against Sean Connery in Robin and Marian and gets blown off the screen by Albert Finney, Alan Arkin, and Rex Harrison in Two for the Road, Wait Until Dark, and My Fair Lady, respectively. If you ask me, Audrey isn’t an actress so much as someone you would like to have known and maybe had the opportunity to cuddle, which makes her mega-stardom in the Fifties and Sixties all the more testament to her ineffable appeal. Happening right when Method was rendering personalities like Hepburn déclassé, she was making a career of being terminally anachronistic. It’s Ozzie’s Harriet, sashaying while Rome burns. Instant nostalgia; even when she was introduced for the first time, it must have seemed like ages ago.

The Truman Show (1998) [25th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

July 12, 2023****/****, 1990s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Satire

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

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris
written by Andrew Niccol
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw The Truman Show appeared during a period when we were taking a hard look at how quickly and thoroughly we had given our lives over to technology, bracing for the Y2K bug to drop airplanes out of the sky and launch nuclear arsenals. The cruel irony of successfully averting disaster is that the morning after, having learned nothing, we redoubled our efforts to sell ourselves to our things. Introspection is like a nightmare upon waking: If it doesn’t disappear on its own, you do your best to wave it away. Orwell’s 1984 didn’t predict how we pay subscriptions for the right to be surveilled constantly, every detail of our lives documented surreptitiously for corporate information harvesters and publicly through social media, where we manufacture the best versions of ourselves to entertain, and shame, others. We line up around city blocks for the right to plant the world’s most sophisticated tracking devices on ourselves; there is a fundamental, exploitable flaw in our programming. We overestimated the extent to which we desired anonymity, underestimated our longing to matter and our vulnerability to flattery. Our will to power through influence, evolutionarily favoured, is the suicide pill encoded into our hardware. In our pursuit of a self to proliferate, technology allowed us to redraft our image and curate our environments. The films at the end of the millennium–Pleasantville, Dark City, The Matrix, and The Thirteenth Floor, to name a few–are warnings about what happens when we project our subjectivity upon the world. Perhaps none cautioned more definitively than Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, which has the balls to literalize the horror of living among undifferentiated versions of the self in a simulation of the outside that is merely an interpretation of an eternity of insides.

Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 25, 2023****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

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

SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner

SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN II – THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Walter Chaw The split in Superman–his faultline where he’s the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack–is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell’s impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone’s secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the “eternal boy scout,” branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as “boring”–the rejoinder to which is that he’s been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal “super” man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken–not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.

Flashdance (1983) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

May 31, 20231980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

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

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Belinda Bauer, Lilia Skala
screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Bill Chambers "FLASHDANCE." It's hardly a coincidence the Rocky movies started this way, with the title scrolling horizontally across the screen like a ring girl's sign for the upcoming round. Then we fade up on our heroine, mythologized via obscured features, cycling confidently through the city to the anthemic strains of the late Irene Cara's "Flashdance… What a Feeling"–a montage that riffs on the iconic opening titles of Saturday Night Fever. And that, in a nutshell, is Flashdance: Rocky meets Saturday Night Fever, albeit with a female lead and considerably less dramatic tension than either. It is perhaps more that referencing these pop-culture juggernauts at the outset establishes a vernacular, translating a movie for the masses that only half-heartedly yields to formula. Flashdance is weird with a beard. It's elliptical and largely free of plot, featuring a modern-day fairytale heroine navigating an urban jungle awash in mimes and breakdancers (but curiously few cars), which is captured voyeuristically with long lenses and natural light like cinéma vérité on Mars.

Hot Docs ’23: All You See

May 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Netherlands

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

Hot Docs ’23: Praying for Armageddon

May 4, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Norway

**½/****
directed by Tonje Hessen Schei

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Praying for Armageddon is about the mobilization of Christian evangelicals, who, according to on-screen statistics, now make up 30% of American voters. That’s scary, but as the movie makes clear, no number is too small to set off alarms. We meet Pastor Gary Burd of the Mission M25 Ministry/motorcycle club, who says, “I don’t want you to think that I am raising a militia,” but holds his sermons in a bunker and knights his congregants so they may take up swords against whatever windmills the evangelicals are tilting at this week. “Swords” is uttered often in Praying for Armageddon, for what it’s worth. Jesus was a war hawk, according to Burd, who quotes Him in Luke 22 as saying, “Yeah, if you don’t have a sword, go sell your coat and buy one, because the time is coming when you’re gonna need a sword.” But the word has an elastic meaning in Christian evangelical-ese, even though influential figures like Christians United for Israel founder John Hagee insist the Bible–which the odious Hagee fashions into an acronym for “Basic Information Before Leaving Earth”–is “literal from cover to cover.” (Burd’s Jesus sounds like Mark Wahlberg, Hagee’s like Gary Busey.) Swords are swords, but they’re also guns, they’re also nuclear weapons. That’s why the so-called Armageddon Lobby (shudder) has concentrated its resources on indoctrinating U.S. soldiers to its religious crusade, which begins with proselytizing new recruits and baptizing them at the end of Basic Training. Presto! A Christian national is born–a perfect mirror image of the ostensible enemy, incidentally. Michigan-based company Tijicon went so far as to supply the Marines with rifle scopes engraved JN8:12, referring to the passage from John that reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” This way, you’re aiming Jesus at your targets.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

April 30, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan Din, Vicki Pepperdine
written by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Bill Chambers Loosely based on star and co-scenarist Channing Tatum’s exotic-dancer past, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike was a pleasant surprise for treating the world of male strippers seriously–if finally too seriously, as the buoyant first half gives way to a heavy-handed moralizing reminiscent of Soderbergh’s Traffic in the second. Sex work in Magic Mike is something to transcend through drugs or a trade skill. Gregory Jacobs’s terrific follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, washed away the Afterschool Special aftertaste of the original by taking shame out of the equation: A road movie that finds Mike and the remaining “Kings of Tampa” travelling to a stripping convention in Myrtle Beach, it’s a celebration of a certain esprit de corps. Despite the instantly iconic scene of Joe Manganiello dancing to “I Want It That Way” for the amusement of a supermarket cashier, Magic Mike XXL wasn’t zeitgeist-defining like its predecessor, but it nails the hangout-movie vibe Soderbergh was chasing in his Ocean’s sequels, and will no doubt endure as the Godfather Part II/Empire Strikes Back of Magic Mike movies. And what will Magic Mike’s Last Dance go down as? Something like the Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo of the trilogy is my best guess. I have no idea if Soderbergh’s longtime AD Jacobs was merely a figurehead on Magic Mike XXL, which was made in that weird period of Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking (though he still served as the picture’s cinematographer), but in returning to the helm for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Soderbergh directs like someone who’s been shown where the g-spot is and can’t for the life of him remember, so he’ll have to bluff his way through it.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD

April 4, 2023****/****, 1970s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, Disability, FFC Must-Own, Horror

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

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country’s history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman’s Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn’t about what it’s ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we’re not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we’re glad that he’s dead, too.

M3GAN (2023) [Unrated Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

March 21, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others–and for sex, if possible. No “ifs” about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we’re not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland’s Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn’t even have to resemble Alicia Vikander–it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you’re opening an entire hornet’s nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers…and prostitutes. Even Spielberg’s A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

New at our Patreon

March 15, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

Just posted: "Unlucky Charmer," Walter Chaw's film-by-film review of the long-running Leprechaun series--a little St. Patrick's Day gift free to all subscribers of our Patreon. Thank you again for your support!-Ed.

Training Day (2001) – DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 1, 20232000s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
4K ULTRA HD – Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes née Mendez
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

The Fabelmans (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 12, 20232022, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there’s a chance he’ll destroy his family because of it–showing things that aren’t for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there’s a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he’s sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too…uh, too, because it’s ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy’s bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans than there are dialogues–more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don’t know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.

Invaders from Mars (1953) – 4K Ultra HD

February 2, 20231950s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson
screenplay by Richard Blake
production designed and directed by William Cameron Menzies

by Bill Chambers Predating Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers by two years and Don Siegel’s seminal film adaptation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by three, William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars makes for an apt precursor in featuring a child protagonist and beginning at the dawn of an invasion instead of the usual in media res. When his alarm clock reminds him in the middle of the night to check out “Orion in its zenith,” little David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) accidentally rouses his father, George (Leif Erickson), who is careful not to discourage the curiosity of a fellow “scientist” while tucking his son back into bed. David is awakened again by a commotion outside, and from his bedroom window sees a flying saucer disappear below the horizon. Dad agrees to check it out, which is of course not the wisest idea, yet his respect for his son’s intelligence is touching. While a twist ending recontextualizes this moment, suggesting it may have been wishful thinking on David’s part, that’s touching, too: Here’s a movie where the child’s fantasy of saving the world isn’t about demonstrating feats of heroism beyond his years, but about adults giving him the benefit of the doubt.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 20, 20221980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, John Hughes

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Commentary B
starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn
written by John Hughes
directed by Jeremiah Chechik

Updated to correct an embarrassing blunder on 12/28/2022.-Ed.

by Bill Chambers After turning in a subpar first draft of National Lampoon’s European Vacation and ghosting the production thereafter, John Hughes made an unexpected return to the franchise by writing and producing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, loosely basing his screenplay, like that of the first …Vacation, on one of his short stories for NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. Both “Vacation ’58” and “Christmas ’59” are written as a childhood reminiscence and get their humour from the discordant pairing of morbid memories and misty-eyed prose. (Think Jean Shepherd in charge of the police blotter.) There is no Clark Griswold per se in these stories, only a hazy father figure coming unglued. As a result, Hughes butted heads with director Harold Ramis on the original, since Ramis was making a Chevy Chase vehicle, not a coming-of-age flick. By Christmas Vacation, Hughes was at a different place in his personal and professional lives, raising children and turning mogul, and the film finds him identifying with the patriarch almost to the exclusion of the kid characters. His screenplay, in fact, reclaims Clark from Amy Heckerling’s aimless and conceptually fuzzy European Vacation, seizing on the pressure cooker of the holiday season as a poignant trigger for Clark’s compulsive need to contrive Kodak, nay, Hallmark moments.

Nope (2022) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

November 3, 20222022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don’t think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Just because it’s more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There’s a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don’t know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I’ve never seen them do that, in any case. If there’s a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn’t, why did he? I understand there’s a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn’t care about the people who work in it–especially minorities and child actors–once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There’s a reveal that’s less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There’s a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it’s explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both–but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn’t the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it’s ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

October 25, 2022****/****, 1980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg, Teen, Thriller, Vampire

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21^st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.