Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 11 of 145

The Trouble with Harry (1955) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 13, 2022****/****, 1950s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Shirley MacLaine
screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the novel by Jack Trevor Story
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Once I realized the person I’m supposed to suture with in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry is the title character, the middle of Hitchcock’s three dead protagonists (sandwiched between Rebecca‘s Rebecca de Winter and Psycho‘s Mother), the rest of the movie began to make sense to me. Not a literal sense where the characters’ behaviour is reasonable, thus making the narrative intelligible in a rational way, but an absurdist, Lewis Carroll nightmare sense, where language is revealed to be meaningless and unstable enough to destabilize perceptions of time and space as well. The Trouble with Harry casts Vermont in fall as Wonderland aswarm with madness and violence, lodged in a time-loop and peopled by a gallery of hatters and dormice (and even an Alice, completely over-the-rainbow insane) preserved in an autumnal, solipsistic amber of their own deconstructionist, semantic derangement. The closest analogues in movies are Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michel Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore: the former echoing The Trouble with Harry‘s thesis that if reality is defined by language, then reality is as subject to slippage as language; the latter harking back to this film’s snow-globe meta-fiction, where life and death play out its meaningless permutations in a philosophical exercise inside an alien terrarium. The Trouble with Harry would play well in a double-feature with Scorsese’s existentially terrifying After Hours. Godard’s Alphaville, too–a noir about the prison of words where every room contains a “bible,” which, in reality, is a dictionary with telltale words removed (like “poetry” and “love”), thereby eradicating them from the minds of a citizenry enslaved by a machine god.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

June 9, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Malta, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Emily Carmichael & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw About an hour into Jurassic World Dominion, a nondescript villain–really, the bad guys are all nondescript here, no matter their gender or race–with the admittedly ridiculous name Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze) is pinned on his back by two dinosaurs eating his arms. Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Chad–er, Brad, er…Owen? Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Owen (Chris Pratt), screams at Rainn to give up vital information about the location of the emotionless British cyborg clone from the last film, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who (that?) Owen and his girlfriend/wife/whatever, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), have since adopted. Rainn, before getting his head torn off tastefully offscreen, spills the beans. Here's my problem: why? Why the fuck would he bother to say anything at all? When this scenario plays out in other films, it's because the person being asked the question hopes they'll be freed once they do. But Owen doesn't control these dinosaurs with his magic dinosaur-controlling hand, and it's not framed as Rainn having a change of heart. It's just a blatant misunderstanding of scenes like this, either on purpose or out of cynical desperation, rigged to move a stalled plot along, damning the characters and all sense along the way. What troubles me the most about it is the presumption that no one will notice or that no one will care once they've noticed. J. A. Bayona loaded his Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with a shocking amount of social subtext, appropriate outrage, fairytale scale and wonder, even doom. The only thing Colin Trevorrow manages to create with Jurassic World Dominion (hereafter Dominion) is an endurance test of unusual cruelty that, despite its conspicuous bloat, still leans heavily on an extended voiceover prologue and epilogue to try to inject an illusion of plot into aimless, sometimes-vicious, ugly-looking garbage.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 6, 2022****/****, 1940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Macdonald Carey, Henry Travers
screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, from an original story by Gordon McDonell
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Just by the fact of her, Charlie (Teresa Wright) is dangerous for her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten), a violent rebuke of the caustic nihilism of his worldview. She’s too pure, too loving, too good; her existence is proof there’s something wrong with him. Very wrong. She’s so rare a thing, the only way to protect her and, by extension, what he believes about our debased, postlapsarian state is to corrupt her. Really, he’s doing her a favour. I think that Uncle Charlie knows he’s running out of time, that the dragnet around him is tightening at the neck. I think he wants to spend whatever freedom he has left turning his namesake to his way of thinking. Visiting for the first time in too long, he brings gifts for everyone in his sister Emmy’s (Patricia Collinge, her character named after Hitch’s mother) family: his brother-in-law Joe (Henry Travers), his little niece Ann (Edna May Wonacott), his nephew Roger (Charles Bates), and of course Charlie. But she rejects even the notion of receiving a present from her beloved uncle. His presence is good enough, she says.

Mad God: An Interview with Phil Tippett

June 1, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews VFX legend Phil Tippett, writer-director of MAD GOD

by Walter Chaw The heir apparent to stop-motion pioneers Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, Phil Tippett is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. It's his hands animating the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back. He designed creatures for the Cantina and the moving pieces on the Dejarik table. He animated the Rancor, and the bugs in Starship Troopers, and RoboCop's ED-209. He was the "dinosaur supervisor" on Jurassic Park, overseeing the industry-changing transition from stop-motion, Tippett's metier, to CGI. It could've been the end of his career, but his working methods adapted to the digital realm. The product of his hands is, for my generation, the clay of our imagination. I grew up playing with toys based on his designs and watching movies full of his animating spirit, everything from Piranha to The Golden Child. With his place in the pantheon long assured, he moved to the director's chair for the thirty-years-in-the-making Mad God, and the end result is something that looks and feels very much like madness. It's glorious. I spoke with Mr. Tippett over Zoom and was betrayed once or twice by overwhelming emotion; I thought I was done feeling like this about things, but speaking with the father of Vermithrax Pejorative was humbling and exhilarating. If you get the chance to tell your heroes how much their art has meant to you, do that.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

May 27, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Theatrical, Tom Cruise

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick (hereafter Maverick) does everything the Tony Scott original did well a little bit better and doesn’t bother with the rest. What drives this legacy sequel is the sobriety with which it addresses the passage of time–the existential horror of being the oldest person at the bar, of all those pictures that look like what you think you still look like, of the toll of watching your children outgrow you while every anchor you have to this world withers and dies. It is, in other words, a spectacular action film and a mature character drama whose closest analogue might be Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting–a film that, likewise, took its cue from a showy and popular first film and forged from it a work of real substance and surprising pathos. What’s most impressive is how balanced Maverick feels. Its action component is plotted out like an elaborate, aerial heist flick with the stakes obvious and the steps delineated cleanly and simply, so that when it finally comes time to set the dominos in motion and things inevitably go wrong, it’s clear how they went wrong. The picture’s dramatic component is as carefully metered: the love interest and her expectations; the lost father/orphaned son dynamic and how to salvage it; the old rivals-turned-friends and what they owe each other at the end. Maverick is a clockwork, a model of efficiency and effective storytelling; there are multiple avenues to appreciating this movie. I was afraid a sequel to a macho, homoerotic recruitment video bankrolled by the United States military would have no sense of its silliness. I’m happy to be wrong.

Saboteur (1942) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 22, 20221940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Disability, Espionage, Road Movie, Thriller, War

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn’t often, it’s as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch’s shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill–disastrously, I think–with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there’s a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock’s career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an “all-American” film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he’d left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country’s heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

Scream (2022) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 17, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Wes Craven

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it’s not only self-referential, it’s curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They’re better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they’re more important than even Charlie Kaufman’s extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn’t involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney’s childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series’ masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It’s her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon–and through her suffering, the “rules” of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

All at Once: An Interview with the Makers of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

April 17, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews “The Daniels,” Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writer-directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once

The function–the true function–of art at any time, but particularly in dark times collective and personal, is, I think, to provide evidence of grace. However low, however diminished, however stricken we may find ourselves, here are these artifacts of others who went before us into the breach to retrieve…I don’t know: signposts? Breadcrumbs in the wild, overgrown wood; strings in the labyrinth; a way out or a way in. I don’t know. Everything Everywhere All At Once returned fragments of myself to me that I had not been aware were missing. It is one of the most meaningful films of my life, appearing at a stage of my experience and movie-obsessed existence where I thought it was no longer possible to feel that way about a movie again. It reminded me of why I, more than love, why I need art to fill the spaces in me.

The Northman (2022)

April 12, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers’s latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There’s even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film’s settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers’s previous film, The Lighthouse, and it’s the first of his movies that doesn’t require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

All the Old Knives (2022)

April 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz

by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays “Barley” Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn’t fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides–well, all three sides–against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It’s the best film Schepisi’s made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love’s continued to bloom. They’ve heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I’ve loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It’s one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.

The Contractor (2022)

April 3, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh

by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh’s The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan’s recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon’s “Reacher” series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed “all-American” hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it’s an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down “girl” emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

March 31, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents’ story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It’s an immigrant story–a typical one, I’ve come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it’s a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn’t approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them–they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to “break” my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don’t know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I’m broken. I’m working on fixing it.

Umma (2022)

March 24, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

*/****
starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee, Dermot Mulroney
written and directed by Iris K. Shim

by Walter Chaw Sandra Oh is very good as a woman working through the generational trauma shared by many first-gen Asian immigrants to the United States. She’s exceptional occupying a range of complex, polarized emotions, managing in many instances to pull off scenes headed towards histrionics with exactly the right amount of reserve to keep it south of camp. Consider when her amateur apiarist Amanda learns of her mother’s death from a long-estranged uncle (Tom Yi), who appears on her doorstep unannounced. He disapproves of how Amanda’s daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart), born and raised in the United States, doesn’t speak a word of Korean, and he blames Amanda for causing her mother’s passing by the fact of her absence sitting vigil at her deathbed. He gives Amanda a bundle comprising her mother’s favourite things along with her ashes, telling her to provide her a proper burial, lest Amanda herself become as vicious and intolerable as her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee). Oh keeps her emotions steady. She holds on to them like a drowning sailor. You can see the turmoil in her face, though it’s carefully held, and when she tells him to leave, she does it without turning the table over. That’s powerful stuff. There’s an entire film here, a good one, that never goes to a supernatural place with Amanda’s baggage–one that recognizes how strong Oh’s internalization of this role is and lets her do it without things jumping out at her from the basement. The parts of Umma that explicitly fail are the horror-movie parts. It’s not simply that they don’t work, it’s that making an Asian mother the literal monster in an American horror movie is absolutely fraught with representational landmines writer-director Iris K. Shim doesn’t quite know how to avoid. Had a white creator made either this or the recent Turning Red, there’d be an uproar. A justified one.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 23, 20222021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Esoterica, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn’t mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn’t spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you’re riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it–run with it, for fuck’s sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it’s particularly undignified. It’s Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who’s way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. “Okay, okay, see, Neo is–haha–NEO is Mr. Anderson again and–haha, check it–he’s like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called ‘The Matrix’, and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait… What if Trinity was The One, too?” You’ve heard of the concept of “raising all boats”? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat–sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she’s holding. “Hi, I’m Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I’m drawing on an inside straight.” Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

X (2022)

March 21, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

****/****
starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Early on in Ti West’s X, a guy pulls out a guitar in the rented bungalow he’s sharing with his buddies and starts playing a familiar riff. His girlfriend sings. She has a pretty voice. Not a world-shaking voice, but she means what she’s singing, which makes up for a multitude of sins. It’s a tough scene to pull off due to it being a set-up that’s been paid off a few times, as it was in Animal House, by someone walking by and smashing the guitar against a wall. There are fewer muscles necessary to affect a snarky posture than to strike an earnest pose–less skill required to arch an eyebrow than to build a situation with fully-rounded characters we care about enough not to mock for their desire to connect with one another. How exactly, in 2022, do you do a scene where a group of kids performs “Landslide” without eliciting eye-rolls? Especially in a horror movie where a certain amount of superiority to the material is the expectation rather than the exception? Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” in 1974 to talk about a period of separation from her boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. An underestimated, perhaps superb lyricist, Nicks uses a natural disaster as a metaphor for both the violence and the inevitability of change over a lifetime: how she’ll lose her looks to age, how she’ll weather the tribulations of being in love in a temporary world. West shoots this scene without a hint of jokiness, intercutting the young folks at repose with elderly folks–their hosts–dressing for bed. The camera lingers on the sharp valleys and clefts of an old woman’s back, casting harsh shadows in the moonlight. I expected many things from X, but I didn’t expect it to make me cry.

Deep Water (2022)

March 17, 2022****/****, 2022, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Ana De Armas, Tracy Letts, Grace Jenkins
screenplay by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, based upon the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Patricia Highsmith’s closest analogue in film for me is David Cronenberg–insect anthropologists, both, who see human beings in terms of their emotionless, biomechanical tics and repetitions. Her books are insidious things, death by quicksand or, like the protagonist of her short story “The Snail-Watcher,” drowned beneath a sea of the snails he keeps and breeds as objects of…well, it’s more than fascination. The hero of Highsmith’s Deep Water, Vic Van Allen, keeps snails, too. He names them, studies them, escapes to them when he can’t bear the company of his licentious wife, Melinda. He finds profundity in their couplings and multiplications as well as tragedy in their deaths, and he sees in them a corollary to his relationship with a wife he despises and a child he adores. Vic Van Allen can be understood entirely as an insect in a man’s clothing. He is slow, inexorable where Melinda is quicksilver, flighty, and resentful of their life together, seeking comfort and an escape of her own in a parade of lovers. At the root of it all, Highsmith is about forms of escape: the bomb shelters to which we retreat when stimulated, prodded, provoked like snails back into our shells.

Turning Red (2022)

March 12, 20222022, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Streaming

**/****
screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
directed by Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw There’s a classic ONION article where an Asian San Francisco dry cleaner is picketed for upholding harmful Asian stereotypes that I think about a lot–especially when I wonder what would happen if I ever wrote something about my experiences with a domineering mother and a father who often stood by and watched when I could’ve used a champion. There are so few representations of Asian-Americans in American film that the other edge of that sword of getting a shot at telling a story is, what if the story we tell is merely a (hopefully) more nuanced version of the same old shit? Asian women are slotted into two types by this culture: prostitutes and dragon ladies–the assumption being that the former eventually ages into the latter. They are fetish objects with their own category in porn and shorthands for stentorian parenting and management styles, heavy on the scolding and light on the positive affirmation. These stereotypes arise from WWII GI encounters with brothels in Pacific war zones and a myth of Asian exceptionalism constructed to pit Asians against Blacks in the United States. I have seen white versions of these characters as well (both the whore and the drill sergeant-as-mom), but I have also seen the entire range of human possibility expressed through white faces and bodies in the same films. What I have not seen is a similar courtesy extended to minority characters. One dragon lady in a movie filled with other Asian faces and experiences is fine; it wouldn’t even be unrealistic. When it’s the only characterization, however, it’s a problem that actually gets people murdered. I mean, no one watches Carrie and thinks Mrs. White is a stand-in for all white mothers.

Offseason (2022)

March 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Melora Walters
written and directed by Mickey Keating

by Walter Chaw As her star-making performance in Ti West’s exceptional The House of the Devil will attest, Jocelin Donahue makes for a compelling lead. She has about her something of Famke Janssen’s quality of toughness that isn’t undermined by a vulnerability. Lately, Donahue has shown up here and there, doing good work in supporting roles in big films like To the Wonder and Doctor Sleep and taking larger roles in smaller projects like Mickey Keating’s Offseason, where her Marie is summoned back to the family reserve upon the desecration of a relative’s grave. That should’ve been her first warning. Her second is the grizzled local colour–like the Bridge Man (Richard Brake), who tells her and her asshole boyfriend, George (Joe Swanberg), that the island they’re trying to get to is about to have the bridge connecting it to the mainland raised for the season. “How do you close an island?” George wants to know. The better question is, will Offseason be able to lard Marie’s guilt about her relationship with her dead mother with enough gravity to serve as a metaphor for an entire Silent Hill village’s bargain with some nameless, Lovecraftian Deep One? And the answer is…complicated. I think a mother/daughter thing could have provided enough subtext had Keating been in better control of the story he’s telling. The pieces are there, like a payphone receiver left off the hook and swinging for pregnant seconds, but the connective tissue seems to be missing, as in how that missed connection on a dead technology relates to Marie’s inability to connect with mom Ava (Melora Walters) before Ava’s death. I like films that eschew exposition, but what a film lacks in exposition it must replace with a persistence of vision. Without it, it’s like when you drum out a “tune” with your fingers on a table and think that anyone else knows what you’re playing.

The Seed (2022) – Shudder

March 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

**½/****
starring Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge, Sophie Vavasseur
written and directed by Sam Walker

by Walter Chaw A spirited if familiar body-horror comedy, Sam Walker’s hyphenate debut The Seed showcases a sharp, clean writing/directing aesthetic that doesn’t do anything particularly novel but does the old stuff with verve and economy. Here, a trio of pals decamps to a mod-mansion in the middle of nowhere to watch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower. At least, that’s why “geek-hot” Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) is there. Her influencer buddy Deidre (Lucy Martin) is on hand to livestream the weekend’s events, while yoga instructor Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) wouldn’t say no to a few new clicks for her business, either. The sunbathing, margaritas, mild eruptions of personal grievance, and almost-immediate interruption of cell service are all taken care of in the first 10 minutes. Then it’s on to the uncomfortably-close meteor shower that leads to them wondering if “it’s supposed to do that?” Probably not. Suddenly a thing falls into the pool, starts gooping, is fished out by our heroes (lest Heather’s dad “kill” her), and, of course, resolves itself to be a very stinky alien. “I think God took a shit in your pool, Heather,” observes Diedre, the mean one. The rest of the film is what happens when this divine excrement wakes up.

The Batman (2022)

February 28, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy–to which he contributed two entries–remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves’s films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script–delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less–that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the “detective” part of Batman’s “Dark Knight Detective” moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It’s sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.