Authors: Bill Chambers Archives - Page 6 of 68

Doctor Sleep (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

February 3, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Stephen King, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it’s based, Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It’s not unlike Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn’t just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it’s impossible to read Lee’s sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it’s impossible to read Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick’s The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film’s Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny’s mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he’s played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who’s held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you’re pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 27, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Spain

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate–the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity–where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she’s gone. It’s a small moment, and one that works to move the film’s exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. “He’s not here for you, he’s here for your womb,” says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)–but “he,” a killer robot from the future called a “Rev-9” (Gabriel Luna), isn’t. He’s there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah’s videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon–a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man’s attire even though a woman’s is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) + Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection – Blu-ray Discs

January 21, 20201980s, 1990s, 2011, 2020, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Eddie Murphy, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the “Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection”

BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984)
**/****
2011 BD – Image B+ Sound C+ Extras A
2020 BD – Image A Sound C+ Extras A
starring Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher
screenplay by Daniel Petrie Jr.
directed by Martin Brest

by Walter Chaw I used to watch Beverly Hills Cop about once a week in regular rotation with other movies I bootlegged during those first delirious go-rounds with the VCR-connected-to-rented-VCR carousel. It was on an extended-play tape with two other movies (Desert Hearts was one of the others, Re-Animator the third; quite the triple-feature!); back then, quantity beat the ever-loving shit out of quality. (Bless Paramount, by the way, for always being too cheap to encode their VHS tapes with Macrovision.) For me, Beverly Hills Cop was, like its contemporary Ghost Busters, the ne plus ultra of comedy–my eleven-year-old self still a couple of years away from Monty Python–and the requisite throwaway scene in a strip club was enough to be the centrefold in this analog PLAYBOY that, huzzah, I didn’t have to hide between the mattress and bedspring. The picture had, truth be told, everything a pre-pubescent boy could want in terms of violence (but not freaky violence), sex (but not freaky sex), nobility (the easy-to-understand kind), and plotting (ditto). The hero was an African-American man I’d never seen on SNL (which was on too late for me to catch) and had likewise never seen in 48Hrs.. He was small and not particularly powerful, but he was lithe and had a quick wit and compelling improvisational skills, and he ably parlayed his minority status in a few scenes that aren’t the slightest bit threatening. Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley is, in fact, not entirely unlike cultural brother E.T.–the outsider hero with special abilities who, mission accomplished, can slink off to wherever it is he came from.

Gemini Man (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 14, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we’re attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film’s prologue, it’s stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee’s Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It’s kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories–like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It’s considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that’s stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it’s poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the “you just need an egg!” explanation. Better if said explanation were that they’d figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2020 edition)

January 13, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blog

by Bill Chambers The following is an anti-hate satire.

A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away…. – Books

January 12, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Books About Movies

A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits―Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mission: Impossible, and More
FFC rating: 8/10
by Paul Hirsch

by Bill Chambers “You know what’s a great cut?” I said to the editor of my student film–or he said to me, I can’t remember now. Conversations frequently began this way in our cluttered editing room, a glorified broom closet we’d decorated with, among other things, a life-size cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock and the poster for Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. Anyway, the answer to that rhetorical question was the opening of Casualties of War: a stark cut from black to a shot inside a subway car, where Michael J. Fox, the movie’s star, is Where’s Waldo?-ed amongst the passengers. The other person enthusiastically concurred; it was an incredible bonding moment between us, realizing we’d each recognized the power of this relatively obscure and deceptively simple moment. Since Paul Hirsch had edited so many Brian De Palma films, including his then-recent Mission: Impossible, we assumed it was his handiwork. (Smart-phone technology for checking these things instantly did not yet exist.) A different De Palma veteran, Bill Pankow, cut Casualties of War, as it turned out, but our misapprehension sparked a discussion of the legitimate work of Paul Hirsch, who soon became the patron saint of Casa Spock. Hirsch had edited the kinds of films us Gen-X cinephiles internalized like radio hits, and even though we were cutting a dopey little student film, we aspired to his rhythmic grace, which remains somewhat overshadowed by sheer popularity when it comes to his biggest credits (Star Wars, Footloose, Planes, Trains & Automobiles).

Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2019)

December 17, 20192019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best-of Lists, Blog, Blu-ray Disc, The Criterion Collection

by Bill Chambers I learned to appreciate the benefits of streaming this past October when I became so fatigued from illness that getting up to load a disc may as well have been trekking across the Sahara. (It really put the “physical” in physical media.) Then Disney+ launched, and “Maclunkey” happened–a startling reminder that streaming content can change at the drop of a hat depending on corporate or creator whim. It remains a struggle to fight complacency, though, given that a) the screener pool is drying up and b) even the cheapest disc will probably set you back as much as a month’s subscription to a streaming service. In short, I wouldn’t call this a definitive or comprehensive list of the year’s best discs by any stretch, merely the best among those I had an opportunity to audit. But FILM FREAK CENTRAL will never stop championing physical media, for a variety of “because”s:

Please Stand By

October 18, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

For those who don't follow me on Twitter, some health issues have been keeping me away from my obligations to the site, editorial and otherwise. Updates will (continue to) be sporadic until further notice. In the meantime, check out our festival reviews of current releases, including Parasite, Pain and Glory, Joker, and Judy, and keep refreshing because new content will appear whenever it is humanly possible. Bill Chambers,Editor, FilmFreakCentral.Net

Attn: The 27th Annual Vintage Film Festival

September 20, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals

Attention classic-film buffs and TCM junkies: Since FILM FREAK CENTRAL is technically a Canadian website, based in southern Ontario, I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about the 27th annual Port Hope Vintage Film Festival. Running from September 27-29, it's a rare opportunity to see classic films--such as Top Hat, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and La Belle et La Bête (the theme for 2019 is, you guessed it, Famous Cinematic Duos)--on the big screen, at Port Hope's gorgeous Capitol Theatre (pictured above). Proceeds go to the Marie Dressler Foundation, which is raising money this year to provide…

TIFF 2019: Joker

September 15, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De Niro
written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
directed by Todd Phillips

by Bill Chambers Two moments that soar: in the one, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), having just shed the last vestments of propriety, dons the complete outfit of his alter ego Joker–the green hair, the white face, the purple suit–for the first time and does an impromptu dance to Gary Glitter’s stadium staple “Rock and Roll Part 2” on an empty stairway in Gotham City. In the other, stand-up comic Joker achieves his dream of guesting on “The Murray Franklin Show”. The former is great because the music is at once non-diegetic and clearly prodding Joker; it’s one of the few times we’re indisputably inside his head, and, naturally, he’s soundtracked his grand entrance like he’s the star pitcher coming out to wow the crowd in the sixth inning. (Phoenix is arguably the first actor since Cesar Romero to accept that Joker isn’t just a psychopath, he’s also a complete dork.) The latter distinctly reminded me of Phoenix’s standoffish appearance on Letterman while he was in the throes of shooting the mockumentary I’m Still Here, but the reason the sequence works is that it’s legitimately suspenseful watching Robert De Niro’s Murray Franklin harangue Joker on live television, stoking a burning fuse. De Niro’s presence is of course a nod to Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, in which he’s an aspiring comedian so desperate to do his act on “The Jerry Langford Show” that he stalks and eventually kidnaps the titular Jerry (Jerry Lewis). Despite that legacy casting, a particularly baleful De Niro is morbidly implausible as a talk-show host of legend, yet his proto-Morton Downey Jr. is defensible in that it looks ahead to the rise of today’s angry pundits. Unlike his ingratiating contemporaries (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Jerry Langford)–period markers, including the cheesy glitz of “The Murray Franklin Show”‘s set design, suggest the film takes place circa 1980–Murray seems to be jonesing for conflict. Incidentally, De Niro’s head hasn’t been this square since Midnight Run.

TIFF 2019: Pain and Glory + Varda by Agnès

September 8, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Spain, TIFF

Dolor y gloria
***½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Exteandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Varda par Agnès
****/****
directed by Agnès Varda

by Bill Chambers Salvador Mallo is first seen in hydrotherapy for his scarred back, lost in an underwater reverie. The lapping waves trigger a memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz, who must have a painting of herself rotting away in the attic) washing clothes in the river when he was just a boy. Played by Pedro Almodóvar discovery and muse Antonio Banderas, Salvador is an informally retired film director who dresses like Almodóvar, resides in Almodóvar’s real-life apartment, and suffers a litany of ailments–spinal problems, tinnitus–much like Almodóvar’s own. The kinkiness of Almodóvar’s work has always made it seem personal and confessional, but with Pain and Glory he moves into the roman à clef territory of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz–although Pain and Glory is considerably more chill, treating even picking up a heroin habit in middle age as less self-destructive than incorrigible. Salvador is introduced to the drug while making amends with Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), star of his acclaimed Sabor (“Flavour”). Alberto is a long-time junkie; Salvador once held this against his performance in Sabor but no longer does, because time has altered his perception of it. The two agree to do a Q&A at a screening of the film’s restoration, which, uh, doesn’t quite go as planned but does lead to Alberto putting on an unpublished play that Salvador wrote, which leads to Salvador briefly reconnecting with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the old lover the play is about. This spurs him to be proactive about his health: Salvador realizes that he needs to get back to making art, because sharing this one story with others has turned out to be so much more rewarding than wallowing in nostalgia.

Fantasia Festival ’19: Sadako

July 21, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan

*½/****
starring Elaiza Ikeda, Takashi Tsukamoto, Hiroya Shimizu, Renn Kiriyama
screenplay by Noriaki Sugihara, based on the novel Tide by Koji Suzuki
directed by Hideo Nakata

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers After ushering in contemporary J-horror with Ringu, the first feature-film adaptation of Koji Suzuki's novel Ring, Hideo Nakata directed Ring 2, which was made in response to the poor reception of Rasen, a sequel based on Suzuki's own. Ring 2 doubled the original's grosses, and Nakata tried his luck in Hollywood. But with a stated desire to avoid horror (he didn't want to repeat himself), he couldn't get a bite from the studios (which only want people to repeat themselves)–until fate conspired to put him at the helm of the sequel to Ringu's own American remake, The Ring Two. Nakata nearly quit over the producers constantly foisting rewrites on him, which did not result in a particularly coherent or cohesive film, and the eminence he brought to the project was ultimately used against him by critics. He returned to Japan, where he's bounced around in the years since between film and television, documentaries and shorts, gradually coming to accept his darker creative impulses and the public's appetite for chills. The work, sadly, has suffered from a budgetary standpoint thanks to the Japanese film industry becoming collateral damage in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and though the Ring series has persevered through these lean 2010s, it was reduced to schlock (a couple of 3D movies and a Ju-on crossover, Sadako vs. Kayako), dropping all pretense of being anything but a showcase for its black-haired, pint-sized Freddy Krueger in the bargain. For the newest entry, the approach was back-to-basics: Nakata again directs, Suzuki again wrote the source material, and the simplified title, Sadako, unburdens the picture of franchise baggage à la Rambo and Jason Bourne. Bona fides though these may be, what they aren't is a hook; say what you will about the asininity of pitting Sadako against Kayako–at least it's a foundation on which to build a movie.

Fantasia Festival 2019 – Our coverage begins

July 15, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

Overture, curtains, lights,This is it, the night of nightsNo more rehearsing and nursing a partWe know every part by heartOverture, curtains, lightsThis is it, you'll hit the heightsAnd oh what heights we'll hitOn with the show this is it Tonight what heights we'll hitOn with the show this is it Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 11th to August 1st in Montreal, Quebec.

Us (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

June 26, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Get Out was an instant classic that appeared at the spearhead of a new blaxploitation movement. It introduced terms and concepts into the lexicon (“Now you’re in the sunken place”). It attacked race relations with intelligence and, save one tonal slip at the end, maintained an almost unbearable tension throughout. Its signature image of a black face, frozen in terror, the path of a single tear tracing its way down one cheek–you see it three times, on three different characters in the film–encapsulates the black experience: outrage held forever in abeyance, voices stolen by the ruling culture, along with lives and potential lives. Get Out won its writer-director Jordan Peele accolades and the type of laurels (the next Spielberg!, the next Hitchcock!) that, the last time they were handed out (to one M. Night Shyamalan), did the recipient no real favours. And where Get Out asked the question of what Peele’s limits were, Us answers it immediately–and decisively enough that it feels almost cruel. Us has a couple of vaguely interesting ideas it fails to develop, a few set-pieces it fails to pay off, and a central metaphor–literal upper and lower classes being tethered together along some socially-engineered psychic conduit–that it has no real idea what to do with. The two choices for any conversation about Us, then, are to continue treating Peele like a holy, anointed savant/prophet until he makes The Happening (to the extent that Us is not already The Happening, let’s face it), or to say that Us is at best disappointing and at worst just plain bad.

Howard the Duck (1986) [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 21, 20191980s, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Cold Pursuit (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

May 13, 20192019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, France, Norway, Revenge, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Tom Jackson, Laura Dern
screenplay by Frank Baldwin, based on the novel Kraftidioten by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw Cold Pursuit features the umpteenth iteration of Liam Neeson’s angry white-vengeance avatar and its familiarity drags down Hans Petter Moland‘s English-language remake of his own In Order of Disappearance, as does the baggage Neeson’s carrying around after revealing on the film’s press junket that he once stalked the streets of Belfast, hoping a black man would start a fight with him so he could bludgeon him to death. When a white man “confesses” to being racist without initiating a conversation about his path to understanding the innate bias that would have him instantly equate the deeds of one black man with the character of all black men–not to mention instantly turn a woman’s victimization and tragedy into a story of his own crisis and redemption–what he’s actually doing is providing a racist/sexist dog whistle for thousands of similarly-blinkered white men to say “but for the grace of God” and, “who among us?” Except I’ve never thought the actions of one minority spoke to the worth, for good or ill, of an entire race. Not even when it seems like every mass shooting in the United States–and there’s a new one every couple of days–is carried off by a mediocre white man who’s usually angry with women for somehow identifying that he’s not worth shit. I have certainly briefly fantasized about killing specific individuals for wrongs done to me or my family, but I have also never carried a weapon to their door in hopes they’d open it. I want to think I represent the majority. When the hordes sharpen their pitchforks in defense of poor Liam Neeson, though, it’s cause to wonder.

Hot Docs ’19: Campo

May 8, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, Portugal

***½/****
directed by Tiago Hespanha

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Despite its occasional stop/start rhythm, Campo is a consistently hypnotic audiovisual essay that ventures onto the Herzogian turf of Alcochete, Portugal’s Field Firing Range, called “Campo” for short after the Portuguese word for “field.” At 7,539 hectares (i.e., around 47 square miles), it’s Europe’s largest military base–so large that there’s room for livestock, including a herd of sheep, to graze on its grass, mostly undisturbed. A series of vignettes alternates drills and wildlife, though these juxtapositions aren’t quite that uniform, and oftentimes humans are present in the animal sequences, where they’re cooperative and not a blight. (A beekeeper closely monitors a hive to make sure his bees aren’t losing their radar like they have been all over the world.) Some scenes smudge the lines of fiction as indicated by this being a training facility, such as when medics labour to stop the bleeding of an allegedly wounded trainee who says, coughing up blood (for effect?), “When my father hears about this, he’ll shoot himself.” One camera angle, so peculiar it must be intentional, reduces a jeep and the soldiers inside it to action figures straight out of Marwencol.

Hot Docs ’19: On the President’s Orders

May 3, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019, UK

***/****
directed by James Jones, Olivier Sarbil

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers A co-production of ARTE France and PBS's "Frontline", On the President's Orders covers a period of relative calm in Duterte's Philippine Drug War, which saw a death toll of 3,000 suspected drug pushers in its first year. In an effort to curtail the amount of bloodshed on both sides, Jemar Modequillo is installed as the new police chief in Manila's Caloocan district, the epicentre of the country's drug-related violence, and sets to work remolding the trigger-happy "wankers" under his command into a constabulary that patrols the seediest streets in search of alleged suspects to haul off to a seriously overpopulated jail. As we see, there is little distinction made between dealers and users (who typically aren't motivated enough to sell drugs), and a profound lack of empathy for addicts in general among members of law enforcement. "Drug users are a nuisance for society. Unless you get rid of a pest, it will get bigger," says the prison warden, Agustin, who gets his jollies out of hurting the detainees and isn't shy about it on camera. 'On the president's orders,' in other words, Modequillo created his own version of ICE, substituting junkies for migrants–and on one level, the film feels as if it's intended as a counterweight to Trump's characteristically mindless praise of fellow media-hating despot Duterte at a 2017 summit in Manila. On another level, like a lot of current documentaries (including the two I've already covered for this year's Hot Docs), On the President's Orders suggests a creative solution to critiquing a subject who's just too overexposed and partisan for any documentarian to have a real shot at being heard. We're in a redux of the Bush era, in that sense.

Hot Docs ’19: Maxima

April 29, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

**½/****
directed by Claudia Sparrow

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Shot with a little of that Jennifer Baichwal flair for Martian landscapes, Maxima is an almost tediously straightforward yet galvanizing précis of one Peruvian woman’s struggle to keep the bulldozers away from her homestead. Having ransacked a huge patch of the Andes for its gold, the Yanacocha mining company wants to spread their tentacles as far as the Tragadero Grande, where Máxima Acuña has lived since purchasing the territory in 1994. In 1995, Yanacocha zoned for their proposed Conga Expansion Project in a deal that falsely included Tragadero Grande, and in 2011, Máxima was arrested for squatting on her own land following a violent confrontation with the police that left her battered and bruised and without a roof over her head, since the cops demolished her hut. Refusing to be cowed, Máxima accepted that the alternative to handing over her deed in the wake of this incident would be a years-long legal battle that still hasn’t been settled by the end of the film, making all of her victories along the way frustratingly Pyrrhic. But they are victories, moral as much as personal: Máxima’s stubbornness is protecting the surrounding lakes that nourish the lowlands, which Yanacocha would pollute with 96,000 tons of toxic waste per day. (That number, courtesy of fellow activist Milton Sánchez, sounds high to me–maybe something was lost in translation–but really, what would be an acceptable figure other than zero?) “It’s almost like a slow death sentence,” Máxima says. “There won’t be any clean drinking water for the communities.”

Hot Docs ’19: On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship

April 25, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2019

***/****
directed by Karen Stokkendal Poulsen

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers It’s telling that the reality of Myanmar as a kind of Hell on Earth has subverted Hollywood’s couple attempts to set a white-saviour narrative there (John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo), and Karen Stokkendal Poulsen’s illuminating On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship shows how hopeful roads out of that Hell have come to dead ends. On the surface a pro forma mix of talking heads, archival footage, and a little bit of scenic tourism, the piece distinguishes itself with its high-profile interview subjects and a structure that gives certain ironies their due for those only passingly familiar with the country’s history. (Like me.) From 1962 until 2011, the once and future Burma was under military rule, having violently resisted a brief democratic uprising in the late-’80s led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who was subsequently imprisoned in her home for close to two decades. But with strict sanctions placed on all its prominent generals in the U.S. and Europe, the military decided to rehabilitate their international reputation by rebranding the government a democracy.