Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 24 of 146

SDAFF ’19: An Introduction

November 10, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

by Walter Chaw I'm statistically past the midway point, alive for more years than I will be alive for again, and I've spent most of my time denying, being embarrassed by, often hating, who I am. I was born in Colorado in 1973, raised in downtown Golden in a Norman Rockwell postcard of an existence. I walked to school, walked to the little silversmith store my dad owned when it was over, earned pennies at the barbershop on the corner where the mayor, Frank, operated the first chair. I got my money shining shoes and catching flies in the little plastic bags my dad used to put little gems in for his customers.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

November 7, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

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

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

November 3, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical

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

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

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

October 24, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Czech Republic, Drama, New Zealand, Satire, Scarlett Johansson, War

*/****
starring Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Taika Waititi, based on the book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is an instantly divisive film sure to inflame not for being divisive in and of itself, but possibly because it's not divisive enough. It's a feel-good, warmhearted movie about, however tangentially, the Holocaust, earning it immediate unkind comparisons in some quarters to Life is Beautiful; and it's a satire of the simple-minded venality of Nazism and white supremacy, thus earning it kinder comparisons to The Great Dictator. In truth, it's both: it's unforgivably light, given its subject, and it's effectively unfortunately broad in its condemnation of Nazis, though considering Nazis are once again a thing and the "good guys" are advocating for giving them a spot at the ideological table, I mean…can anything be dumbed-down and obvious enough? By the same token, the issue I have with Jojo Rabbit is its essential hopefulness: the belief that people who adopt certain toxic ideas and ideologies can ever change. I think it's possible but exceedingly rare. Jojo Rabbit believes the opposite: that horrible ideas can flare, even flourish, for a time, but that the essential decency of humanity will save us. Waititi is Rousseau. I am Hobbes. Jojo Rabbit only offends me in its suggestion that there are good Nazis worth saving. This is admittedly more my shortcoming than the film's.

Gemini Man (2019)

October 10, 20192019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Will Smith

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

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

TIFF 2019: Waves

October 1, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/****
starring Kelvin Harrison Jr, Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell, Sterling K. Brown
written and directed by Trey Edward Shults

by Walter Chaw The first thing I’d say about Trey Edward Shults’s Waves is that I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that this is his story to tell. The tale of the devastation wrought upon a black family by internal and external social pressures is at once obvious in a broad racial sense and relatively superficial in Shults’s treatment of it. Narratively, there are no new insights here, although a tremendous cast exhibits truth and grace no matter the shakiness of the picture’s framework and genesis. Well into the second decade of the new millennia, however, I guess I’m advocating for stories like this to be told from a different point of view. Failing that, Waves is ultimately a Stanley Kramer melodrama with a banging, transcendent Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack/score. It has the best of intentions, no question, but I’ve seen this story told in this voice before.

Telluride ’19: Epilogue

September 27, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw There's a scoop in the mountain face on the way back from Telluride, like a bite has been taken from the rock. Below is a clear, blue lake fed by snowmelt, so the water is bitterly cold. I found it by accident. I stop there every year to break up my drive. This year I sat on the beach for a while, stood up a few bleached wood branches into something like a cairn, took my shoes off, dug my toes into the sand, and soaked them for a minute in the water as shoals of fry darted around. I sucked air in through my teeth. I nodded off to the sound of the water lapping and the wind in the grass by the road, and I thought of this passage from The Sound and the Fury:

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

3 from Hell (2019)

September 20, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Richard Brake, Sid Haig
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw 3 From Hell‘s twin fathers are Sam Peckinpah and Jim Thompson; when Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) screams “Kill em, kill em all!” in obvious emulation of that iconic early moment in The Wild Bunch, she announces that the picture’s setting in a disgusting Mexican villa is not just purposeful, but meaningful and pointed. In scope, the film is better framed as Rob Zombie’s The Getaway, which, as may be expected, keeps the surreal, cannibalistic ending from the novel, unlike either of its proper adaptations. Indeed, 3 From Hell is as sordid, violent, base as anything from Peckinpah or Thompson; and an observant a satire of how the world runs on the threat of violence and the promise of sex. Likewise, it’s steeped in self-loathing, that sense that everything is in an active state of putrefaction. If The Getaway can be read with profit as a film about the transactional nature of human relationships, Zombie’s films are also best considered as detailed, acutely sensitive explorations of human, especially familial, relationships. 3 From Hell is his most pointed statement about the nigh insurmountable cost of existence. The marriage makes sense, as life is never cheap in Zombie’s films. In fact, life and the living of it, is really fucking expensive, and no one gets out alive.

Ad Astra (2019)

September 18, 20192019, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, China, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat–or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

TIFF 2019: Uncut Gems

September 16, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Judd Hirsch
screenplay by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie
directed by Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie

by Walter Chaw Enfants terrible Josh and Bennie Safdie follow-up their kinetic crime thriller Good Time with Uncut Gems, another helping of the same packed with so much anxiety and energy that it becomes exhausting a good while before it's done with you. Opening in an Ethiopian opal mine, where a huge-karated black specimen is unearthed in secret by subsistence miners while one of their compatriots wails in agony over a nasty open fracture in his leg, Uncut Gems then cuts to diamond dealer Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) getting a colonoscopy. When not having the inside of his bowels photographed, he's ensconced in his little retail hole in New York's Diamond District, doing his best to fend off an endless wave of creditors while looking for that one big score. In a recent (i.e., February, 2019) article in INTERVIEW, Patrick McGraw memorably describes that stretch of West 47^th between 5^th and 6^th avenues as "…a composite of fake teeth, cheap cologne, aviators, dyed hair, machismo, self-loathing, and seemingly uncontrollable gesticulating"–a good description of Howard, too, as it happens, as Sandler finally finds a dramatic role the equal now of his finest hour, Punch-Drunk Love. Howard is not unlike Barry, the role he played in P.T. Anderson's film–if Barry had no success managing his sudden fits of manic rage.

Telluride 2019: A Hidden Life

September 12, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

****/****
starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life takes its title from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I've read that over and over since watching the film to realize the more I do, the more it feels cool, soothing against my tongue as a tonic does, or an oath devoutly felt. It's a roadmap to a life lived faithfully to an ideal rather than enslaved to other considerations, venal or material–and the way I think most sensitive, intelligent, moral beings wish to live, had they only the means to do it. Especially if they don't. Freedom shouldn't be something we afford, but rather something we can't afford to be without. A Hidden Life is an ecstatic telling, like Malick's The New World, of the life of a real person. In this case, of Austrian saint Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), beatified in 2007; his martyrdom is told here in a manner half like The Passion of Joan of Arc and half an imagistic adaptation of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis." It's heartbreaking in its beauty, immense in its sadness, and so topical as to be all but unbearable. The tragedy of us is that this story will always be topical.

Telluride 2019: The Climb

September 10, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Michael Covino, Kyle Marvin, Gayle Rankin, George Wendt
written by Kyle Marvin & Michael Covino
directed by Michael Covino

by Walter Chaw Michael Covino's The Climb paints a portrait of male friendship through a series of clever, tightly-scripted vignettes that depict the buddies in question at several points in their lives. It opens with Mike (director and co-writer Covino) and Kyle (co-writer Kyle Marvin) riding a bike up a steep grade–the perfect opportunity for Mike to confess to the less-in-shape Kyle that he's had an affair with Kyle's fiancée. It's a funny conceit carried by Mike and Kyle's rapport: Kyle, furious, can't quite catch up with Mike to kill him; Mike admitting that was the plan all along. The film then jumps forward to a funeral, a Christmas party (where Kyle's mom (Talia Balsam) says everything except what she means when recruiting a drunken Mike into her plan to separate her kid from the woman, Marissa (Gayle Rankin), whom everyone hates), a wedding, and so on, until finally lands it at a place where it becomes clear that despite the ever-changing circumstances of their lives, Mike and Kyle's friendship, like all good friendships, stayed exactly the same.

It: Chapter Two (2019)

September 9, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Calling the monster "It" suggests some BigBad that should not be named in polite company–molestation, suicide and depression, abandonment, abuse (domestic or otherwise)–and Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two (hereafter It 2) covers each of those bases, literally, along the way of what turns out to be a painfully sensitive metaphor for how the things that happen to us in childhood dig their talons into how we function as adults. Not unlike the pointedly named It Follows, It 2 is a horror film about our personal and collective loss of innocence and the many ways we unsuccessfully suppress our trauma: "It" always escapes the containers we put it into–an idea illustrated explicitly at one point in the film as a thing too big for the rituals we use to tame it magnifies in the Jungian sense and explodes in the Freudian, laying waste to our carefully-cultivated gardens. It's possible to outgrow a fear of clowns–a lot less likely that we'll ever outgrow the litany of disasters that fed the fear of clowns in the first place. My mom is dying. Dealing with it has unearthed all of these memories I'd hidden away, of our relationship and of my childhood. I'm not armed. Neither are the "losers" of It 2.

Telluride 2019: Parasite

September 9, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Palme d'Or Winner, South Korea, Telluride

****/****
starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik
screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won
directed by Bong Joon-ho

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) has a plan. He lives with his family at the end of an alley on the bottom-level of a tri-level apartment building–meaning they're halfway underground and the drunks have a tendency to pee right outside their windows. Ki-woo's dad, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), insists on leaving the windows open anyway. He likes the fresh air. Ki-woo's buddy Min (Park Seo-joon), a University kid as smooth as Ki-woo is rumpled, gives the family a large, decorative river rock mounted on a base. You know, for luck. He also gives Ki-woo a reference for a gig as an English tutor to a rich girl, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), whose neurotic mom, Mrs. Park (Jo Yeo-jeong), is desperate to maintain her own household's equilibrium, such as it is. Most of that involves managing Da-hye and Da-hye's hyperactive little brother, Da-song (Jung Hyun-jun), who, between pretending to be a Native American launching plastic arrows at housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jeong-eun), does the usual things a hyperactive little kid does. His mom thinks he's a genius, but she worries about that thing that happened to him in first grade when they found him catatonic and foaming at the mouth. "When they're that age, you have fifteen minutes," she says. She's never been the same. Ki-woo, meanwhile, is sick of living in poverty–his entire family is out of work in a brutal economy. His plan is that once he's inculcated himself into the Park family household, he's going to get the rest of his family jobs there, too.

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.