Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 24 of 145

Telluride 2019: The Aeronauts

September 7, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Anne Reid
written by Jack Thorne
directed by Tom Harper

by Walter Chaw If you would’ve thought that a film about the early days of meteorology would be deadly and ridiculous: good call. Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts imagines plucky meteorologist James Glashier (Eddie Redmayne) as a starry-eyed dreamer certain that one day humans will predict the weather badly in front of bluescreens. In pursuit of this, he enlists the aid of tragic hot-air balloonist (well, not hot air at that time–gas of some sort) Amilia Renne (Felicity Jones), a fictional character standing in for the real James Glashier’s erstwhile ballooning companion, Henry Tracey Coxwell. See, all the names are hilarious: the Glashier that will not melt damn the torpedoes, the pretty flying “wren,” and in real life there was a “Coxwell.” Anyhow, Amelia, named after the other woman pilot you know the name of, is a showman, arriving late to the launching grounds riding on top of her carriage (can you imagine!) with her trick dog and her magic voice that carries several football pitches in every direction with no magnification. You can tell from the start that James doesn’t approve of her showboating, except that the way the film is structured–as a series of flashbacks detailing their relationship–it’s clear that James has sought her out because of her draw as a public attraction. You can tell from the start, too, that the real vertical ascent is the friends they’ll become along the way.

Telluride 2019: The Report

September 6, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Film Festivals, Telluride

**½/****
starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Jon Hamm
written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the article "Rorschach and Awe" by Katherine Eban
directed by Scott Z. Burns

by Walter Chaw The very definition of "nutritious cinema," The Report details the process of writing and the struggles to publish the Senate oversight report on CIA torture tactics during the Bush II administration. The directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, a frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator, it's dry as a soda cracker and full of the deep shadows of an All The President's Men but without, alas, much of the kineticism. The problem with movies like this is that the key audience for them probably doesn't have a lot to learn from the revelations therein. What remains, then, is a procedural exercise with a known resolution that starts to feel repetitive at the same time it starts to feel depressing. Adam Driver is typically good as Senate analyst Daniel Jones, driven by the events of 9/11 to pursue a career in intelligence. Over the course of five years working as part of a small team for Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening), he uncovers a narrative within the CIA that torture does not produce good information, that there was precious little oversight over the agency, and that although the Obama presidency abolished "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," it was deeply interested in keeping Jones's report out of the public eye.

Telluride ’19: Judy

September 4, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance, Telluride, UK

*½/****
starring Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Tom Edge, based on the stageplay "End of the Rainbow" by Peter Quilter
directed by Rupert Goold

by Walter Chaw One problem with hagiographies is that when bad things happen to the sainted subject, it comes off as maudlin and self-pitying. Another problem with hagiographies is that they're boring, since they're largely impenetrable to anyone not already in the choir. Take Rupert Goold's Judy, for instance, a hagiography of one of the two or three most biographied figures from Hollywood's golden age, Judy Garland: Mickey Rooney's erstwhile song and dance partner, Dorothy Gale, gay icon, mom to Liza (and Lorna and Joey), and deeply troubled trainwreck who died of a barbiturate overdose at the tender age of 47. She's played by Renée Zellweger in the film with an eye towards puckish grit and mawkish imitation, imagining a character instead of a person in a movie designed to do exactly the same thing. What's assumed, though, is that people will know going into the film why Judy was essentially homeless as Judy opens; how she thought a run at the Hippodrome (then the "Talk of the Town" nightclub) in the City of Westminster, London might rescue her financial calamities; and what it was exactly that made her so appealing to so many for so long. That's a lot of assumptions and, you know, fair enough, because I can't think of anyone else who'd possibly be interested in Judy, anyway.

Telluride ’19: Marriage Story

September 3, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Streaming, Telluride

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Another of Noah Baumbach's careful deconstructions of familial relationships, Marriage Story is maybe the best movie of its kind since John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman were traversing the same ground. It's a horror film about what happens when a couple decides to divorce and "lawyer up" to protect their interests. At about the midpoint, a kindly attorney, Bert (Alan Alda), muses out loud, and pleasantly, that it doesn't really make sense to bankrupt college funds in the pursuit of what's best for the children of divorce. It's one of dozens of piquant moments in a piece that makes clear it isn't taking sides. Or if it is, it's on the side of a lull in aggressions. In war, after all, there are no winners among the combatants–just casualties, fatalities, and other victims of traumatic misadventure.

Telluride ’19: Motherless Brooklyn

September 2, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

*/****
starring Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Edward Norton, based on the novel by Jonathan Lethem
directed by Edward Norton

by Walter Chaw Edward Norton's twenty-year passion project, this adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's modern noir loses what's affecting about the source material while amplifying, well, Edward Norton. The hero, Lionel Essrog (Norton), is afflicted with OCD and Tourette's. In the book, this means that as his interior monologue is crisp and empathetic, his exterior is kissing people and screaming out anagrams and clever atrocities. In the movie, this means Norton is angling hard for awards recognition playing Rain Man as a gumshoe. I don't mean to be unkind, merely to describe a selfish performance that does very much to attract attention to itself and very little to support a cast that frankly needn't have bothered. It's the worst first date ever–the one where the guy really wants to tell you about himself. Norton's Lionel twitches, grimaces, screams out jibes that are sometimes a little too literary and on-the-mark. He draws attention and that's half the point of it: to create a sensitive, intelligent character appalled by his inability to control his "broken" brain. Yet in an ensemble movie with a Byzantine plot, all it does is suck the air out of the room. There's a shortlist of "unfilmable" novels for any number of reasons (and a few of those, like Under the Skin, were adapted beautifully), but the reasons to leave Motherless Brooklyn free from this sort of literal go are legion.

Telluride ’19: An Introduction

September 1, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw About 16 months ago, my mom received an 18-month diagnosis–meaning she has maybe two months to live. We'll see. When I broke it to my parents that I was dropping out of the engineering track at college to pursue a degree in English, there was a lot of silence and then my mom said: "Don't write about us." I don't think I honoured her request for even a second. This is the first time I've written about her directly, but I don't believe it's possible to not write your shit. I mean, if you're doing it right. I think if you read my stuff, for whatever reason, with the right eye and the right experience, it wouldn't be difficult to nail what my issues are. They're florid and manifold: beware when hunting monsters and all that.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

August 13, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris
screenplay by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, based on the series by Alvin Schwartz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (hereafter Scary Stories) is a dulcet, autumnal picture balanced right there between the endless summers of dandelion wine and the interminable and harsh winters of brutality that lie ahead. A project based on a beloved series of children’s books by Alvin Schwartz, it transcends its source by understanding the true function of little nightmares: the stories we tell our kids to begin to toughen them up for lives spent in this hell. Scary Stories unfolds, essentially, in the days between Halloween, 1968 and Election Night (November 5th) of that same year, when Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a date that disrupted 36 years of New Deal expansion. Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, but only after Bobby was shot (just a short while after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot); the beheading of the Democratic party’s progressive soul was now complete. George Wallace, a piece of shit still somehow not as repugnant as Donald Trump, carried five states that night by promising racial segregation. Old footage of Walter Kronkite delivering the results of the election provides the background for a young woman, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), trying in vain to convince the adults that things are not going to be okay before calling her recently-widowed dad to tell him that all the disappointments of the world are not his alone to carry. It would be instructive to watch Scary Stories as the warm-up feature for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Both occupy the same dream-space, the same halcyon “the past” where everything is possible until it isn’t anymore. The surprise is that of the two films, it’s Scary Stories that is the less hopeful.

The Nightingale (2019)

August 4, 20192019, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman
written and directed by Jennifer Kent

by Walter Chaw Philomela was the daughter of King Pandion I of Athens, sister to Procne, who was married to King Tereus of Thrace. After five years apart, Procne asked her husband to fetch Philomela for a visit. During the trip back, he raped her, and when Philomela wouldn't promise to keep quiet about it, Tereus cut out her tongue and left her for dead. She wove the story of the crime into a tapestry, however, and the two sisters, once reunited, boiled Procne and Tereus's son and fed him to Tereus. Upon discovering this, Tereus flew into a rage and the gods changed them each into birds: Procne into a swallow, Tereus into a hoopoe (the king with his crown of feathers), and Philomela into a nightingale, renowned for its song. In literature, the nightingale is associated with truth. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is one of his poems of "negative capacity." The traditional interpretation of it finds the poet falling into a state of death without death, exploring an idea that everything is transient and tends towards decay. It opens like this:

Fantasia Festival ’19: Darlin’

July 28, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Teen

***/****
starring Lauryn Canny, Bryan Batt, Nora-Jane Noone, Pollyanna McIntosh
written and directed by Pollyanna McIntosh

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

by Walter Chaw A promising and at times exceptional hyphenate debut, Pollyanna McIntosh's Darlin' continues the saga of Jack Ketchum's feral, cannibalistic Family with this sequel to Lucky McKee's inexplicably controversial The Woman. A few years after her escape from a family of Evangelicals, The Woman (McIntosh) drops off feral child Darlin' (Lauryn Canny) at a Catholic hospital, where Darlin' falls under the kind ministrations of Nurse Tony (Cooper Andrews). It's an interesting conceit that this wild thing, having seen the dangers of living without health care, should leave her charge at an institution peopled by the same society that had previously tried to "civilize" her through imprisonment and rape. Viewers familiar with The Woman will place that Darlin' is the child abducted/freed by The Woman at the end of that film–raised now to be a knowing, hilarious miniature doppelgänger of her guardian. At one point, McIntosh frames the two of them as they stand together surveying the wilderness, their enormous hair making them look like two pine trees in silhouette. It's one of several moments in the film where McIntosh's sense of humour gets free reign. A later scene set in a car as Nurse Tony tries to drive The Woman a few miles is the hardest I've laughed in any movie this year. (See, she's never been in a car.)

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019)

July 26, 2019****/****, 2019, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw It was a late summer night, humid and low, in the "hill" area of downtown Seattle, outside a coffee shop called "Coffee Messiah" festooned wall-to-wall with tacky tchotchkes featuring our Lord and saviour. I spent a couple of college summers there and in the San Juans with my friend, Keith. I'd met him at a Primus concert where an entire gymnasium had been converted into a mosh pit. We locked onto each other and agreed that if one of us went down, the other would pick him up. We've been friends now for almost thirty years. So we were standing outside Coffee Jesus sometime in the early Nineties with two other friends I'd made through Keith: Sam and Dan. Dan, tall, white, and awkward, was playing around with being a DJ; Sam was a squat Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a lot of hours spent in a gym. A guy walked up to us swinging nunchucks, shirtless and raving. Sam smiled, put his hand out and talked to him until he put his sticks away. The guy clapped us on the shoulder as though we were old chums he'd run into on the street, and left. Sam was our peacemaker and our enforcer. I noticed after it all went down that we'd automatically moved a step behind Sam when trouble came. Sam would go on to law enforcement and a sad, sickening stint as a 9-1-1 operator that haunted him for years after. A groomsman at my wedding and one of the best friends I'll ever have in this life, Sam killed himself last week, and I'll never be alright again. I'll never feel as safe. Not in the same way.

Fantasia Festival ’19: Astronaut

July 22, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

*½/****
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Lyriq Bent, Krista Bridges, Colm Feore
written and directed by Shelagh McLeod

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

by Walter Chaw The variety of oldsploitation entertained briefly by Steven Spielberg in the 1980s, Shelagh McLeod's Astronaut saves itself from terminal sap by allowing its hero, retired widower Angus (Richard Dreyfuss), a modicum of agency before the end. In that pursuit, the film becomes something like a rebuke of "Google expertise," a defense of experiential knowledge and Boomers, who have, let's face it, fallen a few dozen notches on the Q-meter of late. It seems billionaire Marcus (Colm Feore) has set up a lottery wherein one lucky, publicly voted-upon winner will get a chance to go into space on the first commercial vehicle making the trip. Angus is a couple of decades past the cut-off age and in nowhere near the physical shape to do it, but he enters anyway because it's always been a dream of his. His life on Earth has taken a turn of late: Long-suffering daughter Molly (Krista Bridges) has put him away in a home, while son-in-law Jim (Lyriq Bent) has secretly lost his job doing some shady stuff at the bank where he works. You could say there's something in here about the corruption of the banking industry, the difficulties of the working class, and the problem of Boomers threatening to become a sudden burden all at once on our palliative/hospice care system, too. There's also a rescued-donkey farm for some reason. Maybe it's a metaphor. Maybe it's nothing.

Fantasia Festival ’19: The Art of Self-Defense

July 16, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sports, Thriller

**/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, Imogen Poots, Steve Terada
written and directed by Riley Stearns

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

by Walter Chaw Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self-Defense is the easier-to-digest version of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but only star Jesse Eisenberg knows it. He’s in The Lobster; everyone else is in an ironic-slopping-over-into-arch indie exercise that presents toxic masculinity and rape culture as something with a potentially upbeat outcome. It’s a fairy tale, in other words–the kind sanitized for your protection, although the occasional flashes of ultra-violence suggest that it was something darker in an earlier conception. What remains is a sometimes mordantly funny social satire that loses first its steam in its middle section (when a post-workout massage doesn’t pull the trigger it should have pulled), then its nerve with a resolution that actually feels pandering and weak-willed. The picture wants very much to console, yet there’s no consolation. I guess the real lesson learned is that the temperature of the room isn’t real interested in hearing how everything’s going to be all right. The key moment left hanging is a confrontation in a parking lot with a random dude who slaps a bag of groceries out of our hero’s hands. It’s aggression from nothing, humiliating for a character we’ve come to like, and evocative of a greater world outside where it’s already too late: The monkeys run the monkey house, and they’re rabid and hungry. Manufacturing a happy ending from this mess is insulting.

Crawl (2019)

July 14, 20192019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Serbia, Thriller

***½/****
starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson
written by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw Haley (Kaya Scodelario) swims in college. She's good. But Alexandre Aja's economical, fierce Crawl opens with Haley coming in second in a freestyle leg. Although she takes it in stride, while talking to her sister and infant nephew a little later she makes snapping gestures with her mouth that hint at some intensity driving her and perhaps seeping into her familial relationships. A quick flashback shows a younger Haley being coached by dad, Dave (Barry Pepper), who tells her not to give her competitors the pleasure of seeing her cry. He reminds her that she's an "apex predator." The script, by the team of Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, is a marvel of spartan efficiency. It's a bear trap. The prologue sets up in just a few brief strokes that the film will be about perseverance, programming, family…and apex predators.

Bumblebee (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

July 9, 20192018, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Coming of Age, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Teen

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Travis Knight

by Walter Chaw Travis Knight’s Bumblebee is a tone-perfect amalgamation of The Love Bug and The Iron Giant. It is, in other words, both a throwback summer programmer (perhaps mistakenly released during the Christmas season) and a sophisticated parable about coming of age in a divided America. It casts Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a gearhead who loves her car more than she’s interested in fielding the advances of the awkward neighbour kid pining after her. And then it has her dealing with the loss of a parent as she finds her way through an already-difficult period in a young person’s development. It wisely hires Knight, who at Laika Studios produced the unexpectedly sensitive and introspective ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which he directed), and screenwriter Christina Hodson (the woman entrusted with upcoming films about Harley Quinn and Batgirl), with uncredited contributions from Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the sensitive The Edge of Seventeen, which also starred Steinfeld. In placing gifted, effortlessly diverse people before and behind the camera and then watching as the lingering hostility around the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic Michael Bay cock operas that have made the Transformers franchise to this point disgusting and toxic just melt away, Bumblebee becomes a prototype for the modern reboot. It’s amazing how the right choices among topline talent make all the work of not only avoiding offense, but also providing uplift, seem a magical side-effect rather than some laborious and arcane undertaking. (It’s the difference, for instance, between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.) Knight’s Bumblebee is the Transformers franchise as it should have been from the start: on the one hand a nostalgic, sometimes exciting, often hilarious story about the coming to earth of sentient machines engaged in perpetual war who can camouflage themselves as terrestrial vehicles and appliances–and on the other, a clever parable about how the toys (and cars) we grow up with sometimes provide the guardrails for how we view accountability as we get older. By the end of Bumblebee, the girl and her ‘bot arrive at the mature–and, more importantly, healthy–decision to move on from each other. Another franchise after The Last Jedi making the daring suggestion that living in the past is death.

Us (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

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

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

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

Toy Story 4 (2019)

June 19, 20192019, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Stephany Folsom and Andrew Stanton
directed by Josh Cooley

by Walter Chaw Much like AI, Steven Spielberg's similarly fascinating, similarly imperfect spiritual collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4 asks questions about creation and the responsibility of the creator to the created. Toy Story 4 is itself the product of a chimeric parentage, this being the third sequel to a franchise that is to Pixar what Mickey Mouse is, or once was, to Pixar's parent company, Disney. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is a modern archetype of the sort described by Barthes: an image, a sign, encompassing an entire history of meaning for members of a sympathetic culture. It means one thing by connoting a multitude of things. The Toy Story films rely on the shared human experience of creating totems in the endless fort/da exercises we engage in as children. Inanimate objects are imbued in that way with our expectations of our parents and our disappointments with them, too, as we re-enact events real and play out dramas imagined. They are practice and we invest them with the payload of our souls; the root of the term "animation," after all, is that literal investment of a soul, and so many of our creation mythologies–Prometheus, Eve, the Golem–consider the lives of the lifeless. The Toy Story films are disturbing because they occasionally cause us to question our moral responsibility to things we gift with life only to abandon emotionally, if not always physically. (A quick scan around my office finds it to be a plastic chapel of toys I couldn't buy as a child.) They are disturbing because they speak to ideas of free will vs. predestination that apply to us–created beings, perhaps, programmed along certain paths and predilections certainly. Toy Story is epistemological theology.

Men in Black: International (2019)

June 13, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson
written by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Banking on the idea that no one has seen Tomorrowland, F. Gary Gray's atrocious Men in Black: International (hereafter MiB4) begins three years in the past on a steampunked-out Eiffel Tower, where our titular alien hunters, Agents T (Liam Neeson) and H (Chris Hemsworth), battle an alien threat to the world called "The Hive." Flashback twenty more years to when young Molly (Mandeiya Flory as a kid, Tessa Thompson as an adult) saves a little CGI alien, inaugurating a lifelong fascination with the Men in Black, then flash-forward twenty…three (?) years to Molly applying for the FBI and CIA before she somehow finagles her way into MiB headquarters and wrangles an internship with Agent O (Emma Thompson). Said internship involves going to London and partnering with the philandering, James Bond-ish Agent H, who gets out of a sticky situation by fucking an alien squid thing. (We're a long way from the will-they/won't-they? flirtation of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Dorothy.) The idea of modelling this movie on the James Bond conventions is fine in a we're-out-of-ideas sort of way, I suppose, but then MiB4 becomes the very worst Hope/Crosby "Road" movie ever made, which is an extremely low bar because those movies were terrible.

The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

June 11, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical, Zombie

½*/****
starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Near the end of Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, Centerville police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray)–probably named after legendary everyman actor Cliff Robertson just because–intones to his deputy Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver)–probably named after legendary Formula 1 driver Ronnie Peterson just because–that Jim Jarmusch is a dick. He’s responding to Ronnie’s revelation that Jim has let him read the entire script while only letting Cliff read certain scenes. Luigi Pirandello did shit like this in his exhausting, wall-breaking, self-referential stuff. He believed the actor would inevitably break with the text and so, in his most famous play, “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, he has them reject their script and question their existence. A forerunner to the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello was held in some esteem (and met with an equal amount of suspicion) by Mussolini–you can read into the rebellion of his fictional characters from their fictional circumstances a hint of his true allegiances. It’s timely, given our current fascist circumstances, for Jarmusch to evoke Pirandello, I guess, and other modern examples like Daffy Duck’s “Duck Amuck” short and Grant Morrison’s “Coyote Gospel” one-shot in the late-’90s Vertigo run of “Animal Man” support the playwright’s case for immortality. But it’s hard to get too excited when the execution is this pleased with itself. The conceit (much like when Moriarty became sentient on the Holodeck in that one episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”) is ever in danger of pomposity and self-parody. Jarmusch, who already mucks around in narrative grey areas–such as conceiving of a poet/bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, NJ and reveres a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams called, that’s right, Paterson–doesn’t need to get so granular about it. The Dead Don’t Die plays an awful lot like Jarmusch explaining Jarmusch to a slow child.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

June 6, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain
written and directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw So downbeat it plays like a dirge, or a riff on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" (which Dylan described as ten pages of self-loathing prose "vomit" that needed to be set to music), Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix ain't got nothing and so's got nothing left to lose. Subject to numerous delays and a now-notorious reshoot in response to Captain Marvel beating them to the proverbial punch with a space-set finale, it is, against all odds, a tidy, thematically-succinct capper to Fox's X-Men saga–which, at its best, was always explicit about how these films were metaphors for not fitting in, not being accepted for what you were born as, and the importance of building families when your biological ones turn out to be frightened and faithless. Bryan Singer handled the first two instalments before leaving to do Superman Returns. Those three films–X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Superman Returns–comprise a trilogy of mythologies for disaffected loners, brutalized by disappointment and betrayal, looking within themselves for value in a universe that sets them eternally, pointedly apart. There's an interesting paper to be written on why the radioactive Singer was so good at telling these kinds of stories. Or maybe not so interesting. After Brett Ratner's pitiful conclusion to the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, the series began to play with its timelines in exactly the same way reboots of the comics do–jumping ahead decades, sending series favourite Wolverine back in time to stop a mutant genocide–and consequently delivered a few gems along the way in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Logan. In the battle between continuity and quality, I guess I don't care if these characters never seem to age.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

May 30, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ziyi Zhang
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Everyone is really stressed out in Michael Dougherty's dreadful Godzilla: King of the Monsters (hereafter Godzilla 2), the crass follow-up to 2014's Godzilla, Gareth Edwards's lovely, Spielbergian reboot of the storied Toho franchise for the American market. Everyone here starts at about a 9, temple-veins popping and spittle flying–the undercard attraction to the titanic title bouts between immense CG phantoms. For his part, everyman wolf biologist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) starts at "Nicholson in The Shining" and ramps up to "Pacino in Heat" before settling down somewhere near status quo William Petersen for the remainder. That little muscle in Chandler's jaw gets a good, clenched workout. Mark is called onto the scene because his ex, batshit Dr. Emma (Vera Farmiga), has spirited away their high-strung daughter, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who's designed an electronic doohickey called "Orca," the better to talk to all the giant monsters people have discovered across the globe. Operation of said doohickey appears to involve standard smartphone skills, so the necessity of pulling Mark out of the wilderness to help track down Emma is suspect. He's certainly scream-y and agitated about the whole thing.