Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 27 of 149

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)

January 8, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Christmas, Horror, Malaysia, Mystery, New Zealand, Nicolas Cage, Portugal, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that’s particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They’re fairy tales, fables. They’re warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they’re how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species’ survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don’t come home if they’re caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades–each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

1917 (2019)

January 6, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK, War

*/****
starring Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Daniel Mays, Colin Firth
screenplay by Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw Paul Fussell wrote what is for me the definitive book about WWI. It’s not an exhaustive history à la Martin Gilbert’s authoritative volume (or the countless other masterpieces and approaches the conflict has spawned from authors such as Robert Graves, Barbara Tuchman, and Erich Maria Remarque, not to mention the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen), but Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory was my gateway to understanding how war has influenced our outlook on the world and our interpretation of it. From the start, Fussell goes deep on the notion of war as “ironic action,” giving a close reading of a passage from Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, in which a young lance-corporal cheerfully fixes tea in a shelter as the author walks by. A shell drops, the author breathes a sigh of relief at the near miss, but a cry calls him back to a scene of carnage as the lance-corporal has been reduced to “gobbets of blackening flesh.” Just at that moment, “the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.” He offers further examples, for instance the mother driven to madness by two of her three sons being killed in a doomed push and then, once the third has been targeted for salvation by his commanders, news that a shell has detonated, leaving only one man dead (guess who) and all of his compatriots unscathed. Irony, Fussell argues, was the only way, post-Battle of the Somme, for shell-shocked survivors to impart the screaming, existential absurdity of freshly-mechanized war’s indescribable atrocity. WWI defeated the peculiar innocence evinced by the prophylaxis of language immediately prior to its screaming nihilism. Reality had shifted for us in a season of impersonal death–our language and means of expressing the same with it.

“The 50 Best Films of 2019” by Walter Chaw

January 1, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

2019 will be defined for me by two things–one is interesting, the other is not. The “not” is that my friend Sam killed himself. He used a gun. Sam and I disagreed about guns. He had been in various levels of law enforcement, retired to be a 9-1-1 operator, found himself traumatized after his service, and moved across the country to be closer to his young daughter and ex-wife. To be a dad, you know. Sam owned a lot of guns, but in the last couple of years, he began to ask me about statistics and troubling trends. Mass shooting events devastated him–as they devastated all of us, before we got used to them–and the doctrine and culture in which he was raised started to show its limitations as a strategy for species survival.

Little Women (2019)

December 24, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Greta Gerwig, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Halfway through Greta Gerwig's rejiggering of Louisa May Alcott's beloved and stultifying classic of marrying well, the four March women gather in their attic to play dress-up in a homegrown drama club. Their purpose that day is to inaugurate honorary March sister Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) into their ranks, and the energetic, excited babble of children playing at theatre and democracy rises to the rafters as a joyful noise. The appeal of this Little Women, I think, is that it tries very hard to maintain this level of energy throughout; and the ultimate failure of this Little Women is that its reasons for doing so are inspired less by genuine exuberance than by calculated, maybe even arch, affectation. This little play-within-a-play is like Hamlet's play-within-a-play: it's the key. Gerwig's adaptation is careful in constructing an image of itself of progressiveness and metatext without risking enough to actually be critical of its text and, by extension, itself. It has its cake and eats it, too, because they deserve cake, goddamnit, and who are you to tell them they shouldn't have any? I mean, honestly.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

December 18, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Star Wars: Episode IX -The Rise of Skywalker
*/****
starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Billy Dee Williams
written by J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker (hereafter The Rise of Skywalker) is a breakneck, National Treasure-style quest flick so intent on the prize that it takes its eyes off the goal. It’s slick and frictionless, offering nothing to hold on to and holding on to nothing in return. In it, our heroes rattle off facile one-liners and play around with childish surface emotions as though they were experiencing them for the first time. There aren’t any stakes, and because of that most of the dialogue centres around how everything is very desperate and the Last Time and run! hurry! don’t look back!, but looking back is really all it does. By turns dishonourable and irritating, it plays on fond nostalgia with invasive, clumsy fingers, undoing the considerable goodwill engendered by a trilogy series that began with the same director, hitting the right notes to resurrect the franchise in The Force Awakens–and continued with a genuine auteur piece in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi that seems a unicorn in an increasingly fearful marketplace. Those films, whatever their flaws, were for fans that had grown up in the last forty-two years: the one for their remembered joys, the other for their grieved losses. This one’s for an algorithm.

In Fabric (2019)

December 13, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill, Gwendoline Christie
written and directed by Peter Strickland

by Walter Chaw Peter Strickland’s In Fabric is more Luca Guadagnino than Mario Bava, but there’s connective tissue enough in both to ascribe a specific parentage. It understands that element of giallo that equates surface glamour, a certain luxurious hedonism, with various forms of infernal consumption. There’s a culinary maxim about how you eat with your eyes first (and there’s a correlation between eating and sex, of course), so the first way to read In Fabric is to say that it’s a beautiful film, truly rapturous at times, to the point of being almost tactile. It reminded me in that way of the great Kim Jee-woon film A Tale of Two Sisters, which was so interested in colours and textures that you could almost feel them in the back of your eyes. Another way to look at In Fabric is as a spoof, a comedy that’s consistently amusing and often hilarious, that takes as its central object of scorn the idea and practice of Capitalism as it’s metastasized into a potentially world-ending cancer. Possibly the best way to read In Fabric, though, is as a continuation of the themes advanced by Gadagnino’s Suspiria: women as unimaginably powerful and, for that, terrifying and essentially unknowable to the men who would try to destroy them.

Honey Boy (2019) + The Lighthouse (2019)

December 11, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

HONEY BOY
***½/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
written by Shia LaBeouf
directed by Alma Har’el

THE LIGHTHOUSE
***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw There is a suggestion in Alma Har’el’s haunted, raw Honey Boy that the only knowledge forbidden in the United States is that of the self. The picture aligns in that way with Robert Eggers’s similarly haunted The Lighthouse; both films deal in a sense with the sins of the fathers becoming the secret trauma of the sons. They diverge, though, not in the process of peeling away layers and layers of sedimentary fragments the everymen of these dramas have shored against their ruins, but in what they discover at the end of their excavations. To my depressed hope, the final image of The Lighthouse, which promises this cycle of suffering is evergreen, ever-returning, and inevitable, sounds something like the truth. At the other pole is Honey Boy, which, in the course of one of its fantasy sequences, offers, of all things, reconciliation. It says that there’s hope at the end of all the suffering, that the map actually leads to buried treasure and not just the skeletons of the things left to guard it (their ranks are full but they’re always recruiting). I’m not sure I’m compelled by the case it’s trying to make, particularly as this story has more to tell, but there’s a power to its piquant grace and love and acceptance.

Strangers in Strange Lands: FFC Interviews Andrew Ahn

November 24, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, San Diego Asian Film Festival

One goal for minority filmmakers is to no longer be considered minority filmmakers. Failing that, it would be keen to be asked about craft rather than minority identity. As an Asian-American born in the United States of immigrant parents, I'm still trying to sort all that out for myself. There's an Ani DiFranco lyric that's stuck with me from those halcyon grad-school days where she was a constant point of reference for me (and now you know just enough about me). It goes, "Every time I move, I make a woman's movement." Yeah, preach it. Who the fuck knows what we represent to the ruling culture? I'm just over here making shit.

SDAFF ’19: To the Ends of the Earth

November 21, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Qatar, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Uzbekistan

***½/****
starring Atsuko Maeda, Ryo Kase, Shota Sometani, Adiz Radjabov
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Kiyoshi Kurosawa's still best known to Western audiences, if he's known at all, as one of the progenitors of the Japanese J-Horror movement, which gained traction in the United States in the years immediately following 9/11. Once the U.S. joined Japan as an industrialized nation experiencing the detonation of a large-scale weapon of mass destruction over a populated area, I think it also took on Japan's cinematic mechanisms for coping: nihilistic horror films where evil comes with neither warning nor explanation–and city-levelling kaiju eiga in the form of a nearly-uninterrupted glut of superhero movies. Kurosawa's twin masterpieces, Cure and Pulse, deal in issues of technophobia and isolation with a painterly eye and a poet's patience. They are among the most frightening films of the last quarter-century, proving perpetually current as our world, and our reality with it, continues to fray. His movies used to feel like cautionary tales; now they feel like prophecy. Pulse, especially, with its tale of ghosts in the machine and airplanes falling from the sky, throbs with an insistent, hopeless melancholy that speaks to the essential loneliness of existence. It's as important a work in its way as anything by Camus or Sartre.

SDAFF ’19: Stray Dolls

November 19, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***/****
starring Geetanjali Thapa, Olivia DeJonge, Robert Aramayo, Cynthia Nixon
written by Charlotte Rabate & Sonejuhi Sinha
directed by Sonejuhi Sinha

by Walter Chaw Its title calling back to both Akira Kurosawa’s seminal noir Stray Dog and Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang’s miserablist masterpiece Stray Dogs, Sonejuhi Sinha’s Stray Dolls would fit most comfortably on a double-bill with Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Like it, Stray Dolls is set almost entirely in the impoverished world of permanent-residence motels, where the desperate do their best to grab their slice of the pie. Unlike Baker’s film, Sinha’s is essentially a crime movie centred on two room-cleaners: rough-and-tumble Dallas (Olivia DeJonge) and her roomie, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), from whom Dallas immediately steals her belongings and holds them as ransom. The price? Riz must steal something from a guest’s room that Dallas can turn over for a quick buck. The stakes are high for Riz, who, as we see in the first of the film’s cynical turns, has her passport confiscated by her employer, Una (Cynthia Nixon), who immediately, surreptitiously shreds it. Riz is well and truly on her own, more than she knows, even: marooned in a strange land without allies or papers.

SDAFF ’19: Lucky Grandma

November 18, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Corey Ha, Michael Tow, Woody Fu
written by Angela Cheng & Sasie Sealy
directed by Sasie Sealy

by Walter Chaw There's no arguing with the craft of Sasie Sealey's Lucky Grandma, nor are there any aspersions to cast on the diversity of its crew and the inspiration of its funding as the million-dollar winner of an AT&T- and Tribeca-sponsored screenplay contest. But its backstory is ultimately more interesting than the film itself. In the end, it feels like a support system for the star-making performance of its octogenarian lead, Tsai Chin (The Joy Luck Club); it's not serious enough to make much of an emotional impact, was never meant to be an action film, and is just amusing enough to force comparisons with Stephen Chow's depictions of bad-ass grandmothers. In other words, Lucky Grandma sort of trundles along for a while and then stops. Along the way, however, there's that central performance, married to a few fine supporting turns (especially ex-basketballer Corey Ha as a gentle-souled bodyguard) and an end product that looks like it had a budget many times its actual budget. There's promise here as a feature debut.

SDAFF ’19: Driveways

November 15, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, Christine Ebersole, Brian Dennehy
written by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen
directed by Andrew Ahn

by Walter Chaw A sentimental film neither cheap nor schmaltzy, Andrew Ahn's sophomore feature Driveways is a rare beast in more ways than that. It's a measured character piece featuring standout performances from Hong Chau, Brian Dennehy, and a kid, Lucas Jaye, who, in his unaffectedness and ease, is one to watch. Along the way, the picture is also a calm conversation about racial tension, economic privation, and mental illness in these United States, following a woman, Kathy (Chau), who's investigating a house left to her by a sister recently passed. It's tempting to dismiss anything that wears its heart so prominently on its sleeve (and so uncomfortable to look at directly sometimes for all the guilelessness), but you come to find that it's maybe the kind of palliative cure for the collective melancholy ailing us right now. Driveways doesn't condescend or try to teach something, it simply exists alongside its characters and gives us, and them, the space to recognize each other. In that, in this day of big entertainments and embittered satires, it's something like a unicorn.

SDAFF ’19: Just 6.5

November 13, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Iran, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

Metri Shesh Va Nim
****/****
starring Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Parinaz Izadyar, Hooman Kiaee
written and directed by Saeed Roustayi

by Walter Chaw With only ten minutes left in its running time, Saeed Roustayi’s Just 6.5 introduces a brief musical sting in a film that, up to that moment, had relied entirely on diegetic audio and long, rapid-fire monologues delivered at high volume and intensity for its soundtrack. Said cue highlights erstwhile villain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) drawing a line in the sand in a matter concerning the dispensation of a house he’s bought for his parents. It’s the fulcrum on which the entire film rests: not whether or not the Iranian state will confiscate a home, but the level of desperation that drives the lower classes into crime–and then the addictive nature of wealth that makes it impossible to retire from crime. As Nasser confesses when asked why he didn’t quit while he was ahead, “My eyes were still hungry.” The whole film is about the question of class and the possibility of ever climbing from one to the next. Everything in Just 6.5 is a barter at the world’s late-capitalism bazaar. For instance, the crazed narco cop on Nasser’s tail, Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation), is dangled a bribe by drug lord Nasser that would essentially vault him into a different circle. It’s a boost he needs, we gather from a few tossed-off comments about his kid and a phone call he gets at the worst time that he has to take while the whole world is crowding in around him. He doesn’t take it because of “his honour,” but he might as well have. It makes no difference.

SDAFF ’19: Straight Up

November 11, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Katie Findlay, James Sweeney, Randall Park, Betsy Brandt
written and directed by James Sweeney

by Walter Chaw James Sweeney's hyphenate debut Straight Up is a dense, screwball, and occasionally irritating though ultimately rewarding wall of words swirling around and between erstwhile lovers Rory (Katie Findlay) and Todd (Sweeney, a triple-threat here) as they negotiate standard relationship stuff like dating and cohabitation–and not-so-standard romcom fare like Todd's apparent asexuality (which is possibly homosexuality). In its antic vibe and its characters' strategy of obscuring their feelings behind shoals of patter, Straight Up most reminds of Hal Hartley's work. Todd has a thing about fluids, considers sex embarrassing and/or disgusting, and has interests obscure enough–and opinions abrasive enough–that he's having trouble finding someone who will tolerate him, let alone like him. Enter Rory, who, while enjoying sex fine, thank you, talks the same way, thinks the same way, and finds most of Todd's peccadillos to be charming.

SDAFF ’19: A French Woman

November 10, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

*/****
written and directed by Kim Hee-jung

by Walter Chaw Kim Hee-jung's A French Woman seems curiously of a piece with other recent films about dislocation and loss, such as Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night for one, Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In for another–works at times suffocatingly pretentious but each possessed of pockets of real beauty and the occasional insight. Denis's film works the best of these, largely for the invisibility of its direction. Calling attention to oneself as a director is a high concept that can work sometimes; more often, it's a tactic that neuters emotional involvement, turning the film into an intellectual exercise and a trainspotting diversion. A French Woman follows Mira (Kim Hojung) on the worst night of her life, as she learns in the middle of a crowded Parisian restaurant that her husband's been unfaithful. She leaves to compose herself and suddenly finds herself transported back to a day some twenty years in the past when she first left Korea to pursue life and love in Paris.

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.