Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 10 of 146

The Thinker: FFC Interviews Rian Johnson

November 20, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Mystery

Walter Chaw interviews Rian Johnson, writer-director of

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

I met Rian Johnson when his directorial debut, Brick, was making the festival rounds. In the middle of interviewing him, I received a panicked call from my wife that my infant daughter was sick and had been vomiting. Rian overheard some of it, saw my reaction to the rest of it, and, as I hung up, handed me a piece of paper with his cell phone and email on it and told me we could continue talking if I wanted after I was sure my kid was okay. We’ve been friends ever since. I can confidently say that through the rollercoaster of a Hollywood career, he’s remained the same person: kind, funny, available for a chat, able to navigate the absolute highs and troll-infested lows of fandom with equanimity and a notable lack of ego. Speak to his collaborators and you’ll hear the same stories about what seems like a unicorn in show business–but I’d add the caveat that Rian, in addition to being a truly nice guy, is also razor sharp. He’s the kind of person who likes to play board games and will beat you at them; who will make a bet about his beloved Dodgers with some idiot who has to root for, say, the Rockies, and never let you forget it. His unique genius is on display in films as varied as Knives Out, a morality play about righting a complex social injustice as much as it as a whodunit, and The Brothers Bloom, a puzzle-box all of sleights-of-hand and the love of the grift. Wanting to talk with Rian about the sublimated outrage, the righteousness, of his new film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I began by asking him to identify the pleasure that films like Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun held for him as a kid:

SDAFF ’22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

November 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let’s say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan’s House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun–whose name means “Mr. Fish,” leading me to suspect it’s maybe not his real name–is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan’s peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he’s well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF ’22: No Bears

November 8, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Iran, Pseudo-Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is about imprisonment–a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker’s heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran’s fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course–good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He’s directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza’s earbuds. “It’s not the same without you,” Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can’t pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn’t one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they’ve said. I’ve seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too–letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

SDAFF ’22: Millie Lies Low

November 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill’s hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It’s an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She’s Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane’s on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can’t get back on without a new ticket she can’t afford. Unable to accept that she’s made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she’s made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she’s left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral–all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

SDAFF ’22: Riceboy Sleeps

November 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Choi Seung-yoon, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang
written and directed by Anthony Shim

by Walter Chaw Anthony Shim’s emotionally lacerating memoir-cum-melodrama is an intimately observed cultural piece molded around a Mildred Pierce framework. There’s nothing it doesn’t do reasonably well, even switching aspect ratios to reflect expanding consciousness and experience in a way that’s useful rather than simply distracting, yet there’s a certain tidiness to it all that makes it feel calculated. I think it ultimately fails to do what it most wants to do, that is, express the fullness of the immigrant experience as one based as much on hopeful aspiration as on struggle and generational trauma. I got the sad part to the extent the film is willing to go there in an honest way. The other part? Not so much. Maybe moments of connection and love would clash with the typical blue stateliness that defines the Canadian film industry: self-seriousness undermined by the picture’s slavishness to prestige formula. One part defiant individualism, one part obvious insecurity. Or maybe there isn’t a non-traumatic aspect to immigration and the challenges of assimilation, and Riceboy Sleeps is acknowledgment that life for perpetual aliens is just unrelieved–indeed, unrelievable–pain. I think, really, the problem with Riceboy Sleeps is that it arrives after watermarks like Minari, Columbus, Spa Night, Driveways, The Farewell, and Everything Everywhere All at Once–films that provide a fuller portrait of the Asian-American experience while also covering the key trigger points this one covers. If it were the first rather than the latest, it would be closer to revelation than to parody.

Nocebo (2022)

November 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Ireland, Philippines, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon
written by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo would fill an interesting double-bill with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam, both violently rejecting the interventionist and exploitative tenets of colonialism (traditional and neo-). The reasons these films at opposite ends of the production spectrum might manifest within days of each other in 2022 are cynically self-evident, perhaps, but it doesn’t lessen the fascination of their parallel genesis. The world is being destroyed by unfettered, voracious capitalism in ways so obvious that even widgets extruded from the intellectual-property mill are compelled now to occupy the same sociopolitical spaces as an independent film. I don’t know that it’s possible to qualify this development in that while it seems like progress, history has a way of reducing revolutions almost instantly to T-shirts and freshman dorm-room poster-ganda. Capitalism is undefeated. I loved Vivarium, Finnegan’s previous film, a great deal, mainly because it played out manifold variations on its philosophical theme: to what extent does biology determine behaviour? Nocebo is similar in that it, too, asks a question about guilt and vengeance, then works over through multiple approaches to the answer before landing on the same conclusion that notions of good and evil are arbitrary distinctions imposed on innate compulsions. A mother will be compelled to avenge her child because a creature is obliged to reproduce itself. Anything else is merely obfuscating chantilly on an intrinsic cake.

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?

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Mother, May I? + Old Flame

October 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

MOTHER, MAY I?
*/****
starring Kyle Gallner, Holland Roden, Michael Giannone, Chris Mulkey
written and directed by Laurence Vannicelli

OLD FLAME
**½/****
starring Rebeca Robles, Andy Gershenzon
written and directed by Christopher Denham

by Walter Chaw Laurence Vannicelli’s sophomore hyphenate feature, the two-hander Mother, May I?, feels timid given the richness of its premise and, for the places it’s not willing to go, really has only enough going for it for a short–a proof of concept, maybe, a long trailer that hints at dark psychosexual undercurrents. At its current length, it all comes to nothing, a gothic horror about possession and maternal/filial relationships that has all the elements but not the will to put them together. I heard a description once of serious cognitive decline as having a slice of bread in one hand, a toaster in the other, a bottle of jam and a butter knife on the counter, and having no idea how any of it comes together. That’s Mother, May I?, which finds Emmett (Kyle Gallner) and his fiance Anya (Holland Roden) tasked with cleaning out his recently-departed mother’s expansive manse in the woods, complete with a reedy lake and an overly friendly neighbour, Bill (Chris Mulkey). It’s rich, made richer by a mindfuck game Emmett and Anya play in which they set a timer and then force each other to speak truthfully about past traumas before it runs out. Emmett has a few: his mother abandoned him at some point in the past, orphaning him in her affections, and her death has left him nothing but a windfall in the eventual sale of the family reserve. During one of their ersatz therapy sessions, Anya playacts as Emmett’s dead mom, and Emmett starts wondering if his mother hasn’t actually taken over Anya’s body when she doesn’t snap out of it after the timer goes off.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Megalomaniac

October 20, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***½/****
starring Eline Schumacher, Wim Willaert, Benjamin Ramon, Pierre Nisse
written and directed by Karim Ouelhaj

by Walter Chaw Belgian filmmaker Karim Ouelhaj’s Megalomaniac joins Danish filmmaker Christian Taldrup’s Speak No Evil as fresh additions to what feels like a new iteration of the “French New Extremity” subgenre coined by ARTFORUM’s James Quandt, which flowered briefly at the turn of the 21^st century. Films of the loosely-defined movement dealt with the ugliest parts of France’s social history, treating atrocities long thought better hidden with a frankness as unusual as the explicitness of the images. I love many of these films–Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, in fact, rank high among my all-time favourites, even though I almost never recommend them in polite company. Their violence is extreme and intimate. In place of catharsis, find only despair and self-loathing. I have felt this existential howl watching certain films of Bergman’s–Tobe Hooper’s, too. But I would say the French New Extremity caught the attention of the mainstream for the craft of its presentation and the care and intelligence with which the characters made to suffer were drawn. They’re difficult to dismiss as exploitation or “foreign” in a pejorative sense. They’re gruelling but artistically rigorous, making them difficult to diminish. I think of many of the genre pictures of South Korea like this, too: devastation exploitation flicks made by Steven Spielberg. And though credit is due the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade and Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol for finding another meat-spigot to turn at the dawn of our last fin de siècle, works by Lars von Trier (The House That Jack Built certainly and even Antichrist) and Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove suggest whatever was in the water is spreading.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms

October 19, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror

*/****
starring Phillip Andre Botello, Sammy Arechar, Betsey Brown, Trevor Dawkins
written and directed by Alex Phillips

by Walter Chaw A sub-, sub-, sub-genre of exploitation flicks–stuff like Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler–has cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in mainstream-adjacent spaces where it appears the only aim, or goal, is provocation. I watched The Greasy Strangler with irritation and impatience until a scene in which two characters shrieked “potato chips” at each other in incomprehensible accents broke me into helpless hysterics. I don’t know if it’s funny or its full-throated dedication to battering all defenses finally just worked. For what it’s worth, the movie went back to being irritating and trying for me almost immediately. I have a different response to Jackass, a chaos agent provocateur that ultimately strikes at the heart of some real and touching truths about not necessarily healthy male relationships, but possibly the healthiest most male relationships are allowed to be. Nevertheless, there are similarities between stuff like it and The Greasy Strangler. Both proceed because there must be something that is next, not because there is a narrative that demands it or characters with motivations leading organically to another sequence. In that way, these films are not unlike life in all its arbitrary bullshit and oft-times malignant-seeming causes and potentially tragicomic effects. Exaggerating random vicissitudes as filtered through sentient existence could conceivably be considered satire at best or, you know, knowledge of some kind that might prove useful in providing perspective to those looking for meaning and structure in the universe. What I have trouble with is how often this stuff feels like the parts of Kevin Smith films–which is all of Kevin Smith’s films now–that are puerile and embarrassing. Feature-length shit-monsters from Dogma.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Influencer

October 16, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Canada, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***/****
starring Sara Canning, Emily Tennant, Cassandra Naud, Rory J. Saper
written by Tesh Guttikonda & Kurtis David Harder
directed by Kurtis David Harder

by Walter Chaw Much like the higher-profile Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer takes aim at Zoomers with a sharp eye for critical detail and an even sharper ear for cutting dialogue. It’s plotted with machine-like precision and delivers a series of switches–and switch-backs–that aren’t just amusing: they speak ironically to the very interchangeability of Influencer‘s stars that the film seeks to satirize. I don’t know if this is intentional, but it’s appreciated. I especially loved the subtle shots at both a culture that would “other” someone with a physical deformity and that same culture that would still “other” but “other for profit” the same deformity. That’s some dour shit about the state of things, providing the film a bracing jolt of topical venom. It’s not the murder and identity theft getting under your skin in Influencer, it’s the full-frontal assault of the new beauty myth as it transitions from makeup conglomerates to social-media stars turning a side-hustle of self-objectification and narcissism into a six-digit lifestyle. There’s a lot going on in this movie, in other words, though on its surface it’s a fleet thriller with charismatic leads who manage to give their objectionable rakes a legible undercurrent of depth and humanity. Squint a little and Influencer is a sly update of de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, only one of the partners in this classist love triangle is eternally missing: a ghost in the worldwide machine.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Mother Superior

October 16, 20222022, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

*½/****
starring Isabella Händler, Inge Maux, Jochen Nickel, Tim Werths
written and directed by Marie Alice Wolfszahn

by Walter Chaw Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior is an overly familiar period piece about a young woman engaged as a caretaker for a mysterious and ailing older woman in a rambling country house–a plot most recently explored in the superlative Saint Maud and Sebastián Lelio’s pretty good The Wonder, due out soon. It’s possible to mine interest and value from a template so threadbare, but there’s a built-in danger of playing with a premise the audience has likely already started to unravel as soon as the particulars are established. In Mother Superior, the young nurse is Sigrun (Isabella Händler), whom, we gather from the opening-credits sequence, is maybe the offspring of a Nazi breeding program. She goes to work as a nurse for creepy Baroness Heidenreich (Inge Maux), who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease–though it only really manifests in some trembling when she tries to drink tea. Why would an aspiring anesthesiologist agree to be the hospice nurse for the Baroness? also-creepy caretaker Otto (Jochen Nickel) would like to know. Unfortunately, five minutes in, most everyone who’s seen another movie would be able to tell him.

Halloween Ends (2022)

October 14, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural–and, in most cases, monotextual–training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you’ve painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter’s Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller’s glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it’s either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it’s instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

The ‘Old Man’ and McKee: FFC Interviews Lucky McKee

October 9, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Lucky McKee,
director of OLD MAN

I met Lucky McKee and the brilliant artist Vanessa McKee, his wife, when I had them out to screen McKee’s feature debut May via his personal 35mm answer print about a decade ago. Like many filmmakers showing their work retrospectively, they didn’t want to watch their movie again, so I sat with them in the green room between the introduction and Q&A, and we started talking about film in a broad-ranging chat that went deeper and farther than these things ever do–a product of their warmth, on the one hand, the depth of their knowledge and passion on the other. As they were leaving for their hotel, Lucky shook my hand warmly and thanked me for “talking good movie.” A great night–and I thought that was that, but Lucky texted me a couple of weeks later to ask after me and follow up on a few family things we’d touched on. Considerate, smart, and, above all else, authentic.

Telluride ’22: The Kingdom of Memory (Wrap-Up)

October 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw If I concentrate really hard–I mean, if I shut down as much external stimuli as possible, a dark room away from everyone–I can visit the tiny, rent-assisted apartment where my mom spent the final decade of her life. There’s a low couch, a small coffee table I remember from when I was a kid, an old fold-out dining-room table with wings that made it hard to get your legs underneath it. A hutch, a cramped kitchen cluttered with gadgets like the air fryer that’s currently on my counter and a rice cooker, of course. There are closets and drawers stuffed to overflowing with artifacts, some of which I would recognize and others I would not. I didn’t spend a lot of time there. A handful of visits over the course of a decade–thousands of missed opportunities to heal a relationship I didn’t believe could be healed and, moreover, didn’t have the strength to heal. I wish I were different. I think there’s a terrible irony embedded in how the pain I took on along the way made it impossible for me to redress the pain at the end.

Telluride ’22: Tár

October 2, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Telluride

****/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong
written and directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a monster. She’s also a genius of surpassing brilliance, which begs the question–as it so often does, although the artist is usually male–of what the connection might be between genius and monstrosity. Artists and athletes get a certain pass for their behaviour. The myth of the difficult genius is a popular one fostered, I suspect, by the “geniuses” themselves to excuse their neurodivergence…or the unchecked privilege and sense of entitlement their preternatural abilities have won them. When Todd Field, who has not made a bad film, though this is only his third in 21 years, makes the genius in question a woman, there is now the possibility the monster is a victim as well. A victim of systemic misogyny who has internalized that misogyny; a victim of a patriarchal collection of values and standards for success that diminish women, one who has figured out how to manipulate and exploit those values for her own advancement. I mean, what choice does she really have? The pathway to fame and success in this culture entails climbing a ladder constructed from the bodies of those who didn’t survive the journey. It’s dog-eat-dog out there, people tell you–but no one tells you this cannibalism metaphor is more a literal warning than an artful turn of phrase.

Telluride ’22: The Wonder

September 30, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller

**½/****
starring Florence Pugh, Niamh Algar, Kila Lord Cassidy, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue and Sebastián Lelio, based on the novel by Donoghue
directed by Sebastián Lelio

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder aspires to the scabrous experimental satire of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, down to establishing itself on an open soundstage, but it doesn’t quite have that film’s intellectual rigour, nor its nihilism. Some would say that’s to its credit. I guess I’m glad I didn’t feel like swallowing a shotgun after The Wonder, but I do, er, wonder if its effectiveness isn’t undermined by its essential hopefulness. I had a similar problem with co-screenwriter/source novelist Emma Donaghue’s Room, which treats severe trauma as not only a thing small children don’t suffer for some reason, but a thing small children are designed to heal in adults. It’s appalling. Evidently, Donaghue is stuck on a theme, as The Wonder is also about sexual abuse and the imprisonment of a young woman. It’s also, again, about a child tasked with redeeming the soul of a family and a society. But as the film ends right at the point the real consequences of the atrocities it portrays are about to bloom, we can at least imagine that its happy ending will be marred by the howl of PTSD’s florid demons. The Wonder is an improvement over Room as well in the sense that it’s a full-frontal attack on the patriarchy and its repulsive handmaiden–organized religion–rather than a somewhat tepid thriller with mishandled social grenades. Any full-bore offensive against systems of oppression, especially one as handsomely helmed and brilliantly performed as The Wonder, has undeniable value. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that Donaghue, for all the darkness of her narratives, is mainly interested in the fairy-tale ending.

The Munsters (2022) – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Horror, Streaming

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It’s the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes’s “muse,” though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn’t get to on their own. I can’t claim Zombie’s for everyone–hell, Cassavetes ain’t for everyone, either–but he works on a specific wavelength where if you’re hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn’t get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil’s Rejects on, I’ve been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of “The Munsters” (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories–I was excited. I wish it were better.

Telluride ’22: Women Talking

September 26, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

**½/****
starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Sarah Polley, based upon the book by Miriam Toews
directed by Sarah Polley

by Walter Chaw At the end of the note that opens Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking, she says that her book is “both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.” Sarah Polley’s adaptation begins with the same declaration of “female imagination,” and it occurred to me finally, after sitting on the film for a couple of weeks before writing on it (and after reading Towes’s book for the first time to try to better understand my disquiet), that my problem with Women Talking is mainly one of my own expectations of the text. I expected this to be a galvanizing bit of agitprop: a rallying cry and a soapbox. It was an expectation exacerbated by Polley’s intro to the film at its world premiere in Telluride, where she introduced an “army of women” that included 11 cast members and one producer, Dede Gardner, who is the president of Plan B Entertainment, the production company founded by Brad Pitt. Though Pitt, too, is a producer on Women Talking, he was for obvious reasons absent on that stage–the same reasons, I reckon, that led to male characters in the Toews source being pared away for the film. But while it has powerful moments, as any piece of art inspired by a real-life case of mass rape (including the rape of children as young as three) in a closed-off religious cult (aren’t they all?) would have powerful moments, Women Talking is a romantic fantasy told from the perspective of a dreamy male narrator who has a doomed crush on a perfect projection of gauzy, unearthly femininity. It’s mostly my fault for assuming it was something else.

See How They Run (2022)

September 15, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Mystery, Theatrical

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, David Oyelowo
written by Mark Chappell
directed by Tom George

by Walter Chaw TV director Tom George’s feature debut See How They Run is a Wes Anderson shrine decorated with screenwriter Mark Chappell’s theatre-brat deep cuts, which ultimately just leads one to ask what of it is its own. Set around a murder that takes place at the time of the 100^th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, complete with original cast members Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Deila Sim (Pearl Chanda), the whole thing is a twee exercise in medium shots, split screens, and not much else. George and his production designers are gifted at creating clean, period-cozy environments, but all those acres of slick really do is demonstrate how money can buy a talented team of costumers and craftspeople in the pursuit of a recognizable veneer of prestige and quality. What it doesn’t do, at least in this case, is provide the courage and the vision–perhaps it’s experience and wisdom–to tell a story that isn’t all surface pleasures. The real problem is that See How They Run has nothing to say about the world, about people, or, frankly, about Agatha Christie or murder mysteries. It doesn’t even have all that much to say about itself. It’s more the elderly Catskills chic of “Only Murders in the Building” than the genuine social revisionism of Knives Out. It has its opportunities; it mostly ignores them. It’s a choice, and your mileage may vary.