Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 14 of 145

Eternals (2021)

October 27, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch–which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota’s most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it’s the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige’s desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn’t matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren’t generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what’s happening and a hired gun who’s pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it’s pretty clear that Zhao’s empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

Titane (2021)

October 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau’s first film, Raw, there’s a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn’t bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane‘s tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there’s a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie’s allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What’s constant in Ducournau’s two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman’s body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)–badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car’s engine noise–is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I’m thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings’s naughty poem “she being brand.” Here it is in full:

The Manor (2021)

October 19, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

*/****
starring Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison, Nicholas Alexander, Jill Larson
written and directed by Axelle Carolyn

by Walter Chaw Edited like a dog would edit something in a room full of tennis ball-throwing squirrels, Axelle Carolyn’s The Manor is terrible by almost every standard measure of quality. Carolyn’s own script is tediously overwritten, weighed down by goth-with-a-clove-at-the-all-night-coffee-shop-cum-bookstore notes like, “Oh, wormwood!” and, “I don’t know plants but I do know absinthe!” and ironic jokes about Elizabeth Bathory. The only thing missing is a dramatic recitation of a line from “Troilus and Cressida,” a red rose held in a harlequin’s flourish, and an invitation to a game of chess. Yet despite all the smug listing-off of genre bona fides, all the strained lines and lines upon lines, it still leans heavily on a hilarious bit of exposition obviously inserted in post (“It’s your fucking hair, Roland!”) at the end as if the lead up to this moment weren’t already extravagantly, explicitly spelled out, pitched to the most disinterested student in class. At least one of the alleged jump-scares is telegraphed by the reaction shot before the scare, and all that broaching of serious subjects such as elder abuse in nursing homes, dementia, and privatized healthcare for profit is handled without the slightest hint of the emotional intelligence necessary to deal with them in a substantive or respectful way. Honestly, it would be more offensive if it weren’t so clearly the product of incompetence. I don’t even know why it’s called “The Manor.”

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

October 15, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel, VOD

*/****
starring Leslie Odom, Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom
written for the screen by John Ridley, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg
directed by John Ridley

by Walter Chaw A cautionary tale about writing something whilst in a state of forced, artificial love-drunk, John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack is this year’s Serenity: a film so intensely invested in its adolescent feelings that it’s headed towards a specific state of camp immortality. Nick (Leslie Odom, Jr.)–because “Nick of time,” get it?–is married to Janine (Cynthia Erivo), and they’re that kind of The Notebook couple who speak to each other as though they were scripted by Nicholas Sparks, who, let’s face it, on the Stephanie Meyer scale of cultural whoopsies, can barely string three words together. “Dance like no one’s watching,” someone moans in a high state of agitation. “Love is a closed circle,” someone else declares; between that and “True Detective”‘s “time is a flat circle,” circles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the realm of purple overwriting. In this future as imagined by a perfume commercial, time travel is a recreational lark indulged in by the hyper-rich, causing occasional “time waves” that wash over the world like the exact same visualization of the exact same concept in A Sound of Thunder, a film so terrible that your body’s autonomous defense mechanism has already largely expelled it from your memory. That film, like this one, is based on a classic science-fiction story: Ray Bradbury there, Robert Silverberg here. The concept of “based” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this instance, too.

Bergman Island (2021)

October 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Theatrical

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer’s cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman’s compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony’s having a much easier time of it, and it’s revealed they’ve been invited to this unusual writer’s retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it’s possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it’s clear that Tony’s work is very different from Chris’s. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö–in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There’s a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it’s not.

Frank & Zed (2021) + Mad God (2021)

October 9, 2021****/****, 2021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

FRANK & ZED
***/****
written and directed by Jesse Blanchard

MAD GOD
****/****
starring Alex Cox
written and directed by Phil Tippett

by Walter Chaw William Blake etched the plates he used to press his poems with acid. His first books were hand-made by him in this way. He called it the “infernal method,” and the idea driving it is that every work of art is enlivened by the hand of its creator. Literally. He believed that touching a thing imbued it with animated qualities in the “soul-giving” sense of the word. I think about that whenever I watch any sort of puppetry or, as it relates to film more commonly, stop-motion animation. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think Blake had a point. I feel like there’s a specific quality of life in graven idols that have been directly manipulated by the human hand. Traditional cel animation? The same: the little imperfections, the stutters and hesitations that keep it just the other side of the Uncanny Valley. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is, but it’s stimulating in the same way a film projected on 35mm is ineffably different from the same film streamed digitally. Shadows on the wall and all that; maybe Plato and John Lennon had something there. William Blake was, of course, a prophet.

“Heaven” is for Real: An Interview with Aharon Keshales

October 3, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

I met Aharon Keshales during the junket for Big Bad Wolves and found in him something like a kindred spirit. A former teacher and film critic, he spoke fondly of his love for 1970s cinema and provided cogent defenses of modern blockbusters. Both his co-directing debut, Rabies (the first Israeli horror film), and its follow-up, Big Bad Wolves, demonstrate a strong distaste for hewing to conventional narratives and resolutions. His first American film, South of Heaven, finds Jason Sudeikis at the moment of his superstardom, bolstered by a supporting cast that includes Evangeline Lilly, Mike Colter, Shea Whigham, and Jeremy Bobb, each delivering career-highlight performances in the service of a script that feels personal and, above all, wise. Keshales spent eight years from his last film to get to this point and has some scars as proof of the hazards endured along the way. Like the weather-beaten films that inform his taste, South of Heaven begins as something like a love story and ends, as all great love stories must, in terrible tragedy. (Keshales is absolutely unafraid of the “down” ending.) Its obvious touchstones are Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Beat Takeshi’s Hana-bi; to say it’s exactly my jam is an understatement. I love Aharon as a person, so take this with whatever grain of salt you feel it merits, but South of Heaven is fantastic.

Telluride ’21: Encounter

September 30, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Joe Barton and Michael Pearce
directed by Michael Pearce

by Walter Chaw It’s possible that Michael Pearce’s Encounter is its own worst enemy. The opening hour or so is remarkable stuff: tetchy, kinetic, terrifying–the honourable sequel in spirit to Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where insects become the vectors of an alien virus that appears to change our DNA and, with it, our behaviour. Such a smart idea for an era in which more and more people are coming around to the idea that fully half of us at any one time are mindless animals powered by the pleasure principle and the selfish cell and little else. They would watch us die without a flicker of recognizable empathy. Nothing is real to them unless it happens directly to them–there is no evidence save that of the flesh, of their flesh, that could compel them to care about the suffering of another human being. Not even care–nothing could compel them to acknowledge that suffering was possible. They are empty of imagination, devoid of personality; they are essentially alien things neither malign nor beneficent. And there is no better explanation for their existence among us than what Encounter at first appears to be getting at: the government is aware that an unknowable influence has taken over half the population, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us succumb. Delicious. Pearce’s treatment of it is delicious, too, as uncomfortable and alive as William Friedkin’s Bug, paired beat-for-frantic-beat with an extraordinary performance by Riz Ahmed, who might be incapable of providing any other.

TIFF ’21: The Guilty (2021)

September 27, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the original screenplay by Gustav Möller & Emil Nygaard Albertsen
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw Landing midway between Pontypool and Talk Radio, Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty finds disgraced cop Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) bumped down to 9-1-1 operator as he awaits trial for something the press is eager to hear his side of the story of. He’s falling apart, though; this much we can tell by the way his superiors in the call station keep him on a short–very short–leash, and by the way he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror like an animal injured and cornered. He calls his estranged wife and begs her to let him say goodnight to his daughter. She begs him to leave her alone. He can’t seem to catch a break. But he gets a call from Emily (voiced by Riley Keough), who’s been abducted by her ex-husband, Henry (Peter Sarsgaard). They’re travelling east on the 10–Joe figures that out because she sees a forest fire raging out the driver’s-side windows. Joe figures out a lot of things while, on a bank of screens in front of him, an apocalypse plays out. It’s a vision of hell. Our hell–we made it. It’s ours. Emily gives Joe one last chance to do a good thing before he vanishes, so he’s going to do it, whether or not it’s too late. It’s been too late for a long time.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

September 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on his stage play with songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
directed by Stephen Chbosky

by Walter Chaw Dear Evan Hansen is the Canadian-girlfriend grift, emerging from insecurity and good intentions–that mythological girl from a place far enough away for high-school kids that it might as well be Narnia or Middle-Earth, whose phantom existence affirms you are not as pathetic and alone as you really are. And when your Canadian girlfriend dies by house-fire or moose misadventure, perhaps there’s a vein of pathos to be mined there for whatever profit grief allows. It’s the illusion of depth for an immature, troubled, frightened kid, common enough that the “Canadian girlfriend” has entered the pantheon of urban fairytales. How ’bout if Dear Evan Hansen had been about the social pressures that harangue Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) into exploiting the death of a deeply unbalanced and complete stranger instead of how Evan Hansen’s own terminal thoughts and attempted suicide forgive his sociopathic manipulation of a grieving family and school community? Aye, there’s a movie for you–the one where Evan Hansen is a victim and not the hero, and the bad guy is not the truth of his unforgivable deception being discovered, but the overwhelming stricture to conform that weighs especially heavy on adolescents. The sneakiest thing about Dear Even Hansen is that at the end of it all, it’s not actually okay that Evan is an outcast. The premise itself is the bully.

TIFF ’21: Dune

September 21, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, TIFF

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn’t get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert’s Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book’s story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn’t experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You’ve arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it’s not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called “Caladan”–that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called “Arrakis.” It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it–return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it’s why I’ve read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don’t actually want to know what’s inside the Monolith.

Telluride ’21: The Lost Daughter

September 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Greece, Telluride

****/****
starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jessie Buckley
screenplay by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante
directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw Leda (Jessie Buckley) is brilliant. She's translating Auden into Italian and, more than just translating, she's interpreting the work in a way that's exciting to other scholars. She so impresses a hotshot in the field, one Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard), that he seduces her during a conference–or she seduces him, cheating on her milquetoast husband and two young daughters. She abandons all of them eventually. It's a decision that haunts her. At least it should, though she's not so sure it does. But that was a long time ago. Leda (Olivia Colman) is now 48, vacationing by herself on a tiny beachfront in Italy. These days, she's an English teacher of no particular renown looking for a small patch of ocean to float in, a small stretch of sand to lounge on, food when she's hungry, and a bed when she's tired. There's this other family, however, consisting of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who's struggling with a difficult child and a husband, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who looks like bad news. Though maybe not as bad-news as Toni's sister, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who, seven months pregnant, wants to take a swing at Leda when Leda refuses to give up her umbrella for Callie's birthday party. The cabana boy, Will (Paul Mescal), spots this and tells Leda he admires her for it but also warns her against doing it again. "Why?" she asks. "Because those are bad people." When she's walking home that afternoon, a large pine cone falls out of a tree and punches a small hole in Leda's back.

Lady of the Manor (2021) + Copshop (2021)

September 17, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

LADY OF THE MANOR
½*/****
starring Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer, Justin Long, Ryan Philippe
written and directed by Justin Long & Christian Long

COPSHOP
**/****
starring Gerard Butler, Frank Grillo, Alexis Louder, Toby Huss
screenplay by Kurt McLeod and Joe Carnahan
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw The first perky, jaunty violin strokes in the oppressive score announce exactly the kind of garbage Justin and Christian Long’s Lady of the Manor is going to be: self-satisfied, high-concept comedy that apes Neil Jordan’s High Spirits and Jared and Jerusha Hess’s Austenland while entirely wasting Melanie Lynskey and Judy Greer. I would watch Lynskey and Greer in anything–and Lady of the Manor tested me sorely, immediately, repeatedly. Its execution is ’80s VHS Screwballs quickie tossed together with cheap gags, an overreliance on fart and dick jokes, exaggerated in-camera effects, and skits that fall flat and don’t stop falling for at least ten or twenty beats after they’ve died. They were dead before they got there. There are montages that are just expository scenes strung together and there’s a running gag where Greer is asked to shake her head disapprovingly while Lynskey sucks on a bar of soap and shrugs. There’s another where Greer makes “silly” faces in a mirror for a long, long time to demonstrate how she misses her friend and also how maybe she’s loosening up, and it’s unbelievably painful to watch someone so brilliant and naturally hilarious shoehorned into a square hole as stolid and unforgiving as this. Admittedly, it takes actual talent to make something this terrible. I mean, you can’t do it accidentally.

Telluride ’21: The Power of the Dog

September 14, 2021****/****, 2021, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, New Zealand, Romance, Streaming, Telluride, UK, Western

****/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee
written by Jane Campion, based on the novel by Thomas Savage
directed by Jane Campion

by Walter Chaw There is about Jane Campion’s work the air of the poet, and indeed there may be no better interpreter, translator, or adaptor of poetry than another poet. Her body of work is, to a one, in the thrall of the rapture of language: what words are capable of when arranged properly, powerfully. Campion demonstrates mastery of both what is spoken and what is seen, how words delivered with exquisite, just-so composition and deadly-true execution become, at the moment of their sublimation, images in the mind like witchcraft with no physical intervention in between. Music in the eye. Of all the easy and obvious examples in her work–the imagistic, rapturous biography of John Keats (Bright Star), the voice of the voiceless in The Piano, the shockingly immediate illumination of Kiwi author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table–the one that springs to mind most easily and often when I’m describing Campion’s work is the reaction of New York City English teacher Frankie, played by Meg Ryan, as she contemplates the words of Lorca printed on a literacy campaign poster in a subway car in Campion’s In the Cut. She looks upon them as a sinner looks upon the gallery of saints illuminated in the coloured windows of old cathedrals. Words are a rapture, a vehicle, and Campion, with her training as a painter, proves through the medium of film to be the premier painter of words. Loathe to make such pronouncements, I nonetheless spend most days thinking of Campion as my favourite living director and other days thinking of her as my favourite of all time. She is an artist.

Malignant (2021)

September 13, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan’s Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone’s The Hand is–or, more to the point, Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It’s what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic “madwoman” picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also… Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It’s the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. I’m not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

Telluride ’21: C’mon C’mon

September 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scoot McNairy, Gaby Hoffmann, Jaboukie Young-White
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw It takes a certain level of courage to make a movie like Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, in which at least one, possibly two of the three main characters are so profoundly irritating it would be cathartic to see them shocked into compliant conformity. But that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. It’s a film about mining difficult conversations, asking the right questions and listening to the answers, practicing empathy when it’s absolutely the riskiest thing to do, i.e., when the person you’re trying to empathize with is smart, slippery, and able to push all of your buttons. Relationships, in other words–intimate ones with family where between platitudes and comfortable silences, there can erupt withering indictments and unresolved grievances. I love Mills’s Beginners and 20th Century Women because of their essential kindness, how Mills writes dialogue that’s searching without being grating, honest without being cruel. His characters are looking for the right way to do things, the elegant thing to say at the moment of crisis, but they’re thwarted by unexpected developments and circumstances beyond their control. His films are about navigating choppy waters with only the love of your family to guide you, and they’re beautiful.

Telluride ’21: Cyrano

September 9, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Musical, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Erica Schmidt, based on the play by Edmond Rostand
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Joe Wright’s derided Pan where Nirvana‘s anthemic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is stirringly transposed into an indentured/enslaved orphans’ lament. I thought to myself that Wright had a musical in him if he wanted, and here it is, this umpteenth adaptation of Cyrano (de Bergerac), which I fought against for a little while and then went along with. I had a similar experience with Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, where an old idea presented in an earnest and earnestly gonzo way lives or dies by our investment in the chemistry of its central pair and the melancholy embedded in the thought that every love story is a tragedy eventually. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National wrote the songs and score for this musical reimagining of Rostand’s fable. They are the band I have seen the most times in concert. They were my kids’ first experience at Red Rocks–we planned it that way, planting the seed maybe for somewhere down the line when they will look back and understand why the band’s stories of loss, regret, and the briefness of all things spoke to me so loudly.

Telluride ’21: Spencer

September 8, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman’s excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage–a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It’s one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England‘s afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain’s impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana’s tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain’s previous examination of a woman encased–and left adrift–in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman’s takedown of Thatcher’s England, and all three left me a mess.

Telluride ’21: King Richard

September 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jon Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott
written by Zach Baylin
directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

by Walter Chaw You know what this movie is. You know the major beats, you know the resolution, and in those rare instances when something happens you maybe don’t expect, you know immediately how it will resolve. There is no surprise to movies like Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard by design, not misstep–they are by their nature for the least discriminating audience, the ones desperate to avoid challenge, thinking, reconsideration, discomfort. It is Taco Bell on vacation. You go there for a reason and none of it has to do with the quality of the food. It’s the disgusting robe you’ve had since college that your wife begs you to throw away, but you don’t. King Richard is garbage that people like, machine-extruded pap, hardwired and cynically engineered to garner a certain level of prestige. It’s the uplift picture multiplied by a minority voice. It’s ugly manipulation, more horse-betting than art–though the gamblers would argue that what they do is science rather than just venal calculation.

Telluride ’21: The French Dispatch

September 5, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
**/****
starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw Out of three sections, not including a framing story, there is one that gets what it’s after with the soul of wit and a tug of the heart along the way. It’s the middle section, the one concerning a brilliant modern artist incarcerated in a French prison for dismembering two bartenders who falls in love with one of his jailers. He is Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his eternal Beatrice, his jack-booted muse, is Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the pas de deux they perform together encapsulates a range of lovely nuance that crystallizes what it is that Wes Anderson does very well, if only occasionally these days, in brief flashes glimpsed between the metric ton of artifice and affectation. For many, the chantilly is the point of Anderson–those gaudy elements that make him one of the most satirized filmmakers of his generation. For me, and up through The Darjeeling Limited, what I liked best about Wes Anderson was his sometimes shockingly effective grappling with absent fathers and broken families. His twee quirk used to be a delivery system for emotional squalls. Now, if those crescendos are there, they’re gasping for air.