Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 32 of 145

The Snowman (2017)

October 22, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini and Søren Sveistrup, based on the novel by Jo Nesbø
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman, an adaptation of the seventh in Jo Nesbø’s literary crime series, treats its narrative as gestural performance art: a suggestion of a suggestion of genre. When it’s fascinating, it operates with a certain dream logic, where one thing leads to another thing senselessly, nightmarishly, the dreamer buoyed along powerless to affect his own fate within the larger, obscure narrative. Harrison Ford famously complained that Blade Runner is a movie about a detective who doesn’t do any detecting. The Snowman is a movie about a detective who can’t do any detecting because there isn’t any connective tissue. No matter what the teasing notes left by its serial killer claim, there are no clues. It’s very much like Andrew Fleming’s own abortive attempt at a franchise, Nancy Drew, which is also alien in its behaviour, acting like a movie would act if it were made by a sea cucumber. Consider a scene in The Snowman that pushes the story to its conclusion: there’s a revelation, a key piece of evidence or something, and a location, and the heroine, Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), stands up at her desk. A male colleague, who was sitting in a cubicle across from Katrine, suddenly teleports to the balcony above her as she leaves. He asks if she’s all right. The better question would be if there was so little footage shot that every bit of it was used, continuity be damned. The great Thelma Schoonmaker was brought in at the eleventh hour, presumably at the behest of executive producer Martin Scorsese (once slated to direct the film), in a presumed attempt to save the project. Schoonmaker, for everything she’s great at, was never that great at continuity under the best of circumstances. Something Scorsese played around with in Shutter Island. Something that occasionally turns The Snowman into a Gertrude Stein piece.

The Florida Project (2017)

October 17, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Sean Baker’s The Florida Project follows the day-to-day of a group of five- or six-year-olds as they run wild through the broken-down streets, hot-sheet motels, and abandoned buildings that serve as the ramshackle spokes radiating out from Disney World in Orlando. Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is the ringleader, impossibly exuberant and sly in exactly and only the way a six-year-old in full operational mode can be. She is a force of nature, and Prince’s performance is entirely unaffected. It’s a miracle. Moonee’s best friends are Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), and they roam far afield, standing on picnic tables, exploring empty housing units, experimenting with lighters, and scamming ice-cream cones from marks more exhausted by their pitch (“I have asthma and my doctor said that I…”) than convinced by it. I was free like this when I was 5. I grew up in downtown Golden, Colorado, which has as its main identifying feature a wooden sign stretching across its “main” street (“Washington”) that says “Howdy Folks!” I used to catch flies and shine shoes in the barbershop on the corner. The barber was the mayor, Frank. I spent the pennies I earned at the 5 and 10 across the street. The Florida Project is about that.

The Foreigner (2017)

October 15, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Jackie Chan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan’s Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy’s farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter’s death. It’s a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn’t a great film, but it’s an interesting one for all its mediocrity.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

October 4, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It’s opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they’ve all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps–and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren’t any questions left for Villeneuve’s picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It’s a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn’t belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg’s A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.

Telluride ’17: Loving Vincent

September 21, 20172017, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Mystery, Poland, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

*/****
written by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Jacek Dehnel
directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

by Walter Chaw I love stop-motion animation. William Blake referred to the “infernal method,” talking about etching plates with acid and how each print of his work would be touched by him, the artist, to better imbue it with life. Stop-motion animation to me is evidence that there’s something to the idea of a transference of vitality through human contact. It’s why I was curious about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s insane Loving Vincent, a feature-length film composed of over 65,000 hand-painted oil paintings, animating Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and making characters of his subjects. It’s a fascinating experiment, the product of one of those late-night bull sessions fuelled by cigarettes and whiskey where aspiring artist-types and freshman cosmology students get profound with one another. Consider Loving Vincent to be the cold reality of the morning after. Over 100 artists laboured over 10 years to essentially make a tedious rotoscope cartoon held together, barely, by an embarrassing screenplay dependent on loads of exposition and a repetitive flashback device. It’s an endurance test of rare sadism.

Telluride ’17: First Reformed

September 19, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Walter Chaw The title character of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is consumed by his inconsequence. Determined to make a difference, he can’t even make an impression on the vile inhabitants of the little town that is his parish. It consumes him. It kills him. No one notices. There’s nothing to notice. Bresson doesn’t even bother to show it. The priest’s voiceovers become more urgent, though his faith never flags. He develops terrible stomach pains he seeks to soothe with an austere diet of bread soaked in wine: the Host, I guess, that nourishes communion with the holy spirit, but also the cancer in his gut that consumes him. His last words? “All is grace.” Paul Schrader, raised in the Dutch Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, which basically believes that Christians don’t earn their salvation but rather receive it as a gift they don’t deserve, has made it his life’s work to react against his faith–and to live it, too, when reaction fails. Towards the end of his new film, First Reformed, the priest, Toller (Ethan Hawke), writes on his church’s whiteboard “Will God Forgive Us?,” which is less Calvinist–God already has forgiven us–than a sign of a faith in severe crisis. Schrader’s riffed on Bresson’s film before with his script for Taxi Driver, still his best-known work despite a career littered with masterpieces of individual fears, men in isolation from God, and spiritual self-loathing. In Taxi Driver, the Priest is a sociopath driving through a Times Square hellscape, praying for the apocalypse to come as a purifying, obliterating rain. He tries to kill himself, but becomes a hero instead. First Reformed is either less cynical or more cynical than that. It’s complicated.

Telluride ’17: Lady Bird

September 17, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, Telluride, Telluride 2017

**½/****
starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Greta Gerwig’s solo hyphenate debut bears the influence of erstwhile collaborator Noah Baumbach’s urbane micro-comedies–Hal Hartley’s, too, along with some DNA borrowed from Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse for spice. It’s a talky domestic drama featuring a precocious, strong-willed iconoclast who has named herself “Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan) and is, as a character, the best description of the film that houses her. She’s smart but not book-smart and, in the end, not smart enough to avoid having her heart broken by a couple of bad decisions on her way out of senior year in high school and the great grey beast Sacramento. She tells her first boyfriend, Danny (the already-great Lucas Hedges), that she’s from the “wrong side of the tracks,” which, when he lets it slip in front of Lady Bird’s mom Marion (Laurie Metcalf), obviously hurts Marion’s feelings a lot, but she bites her lip. When he does it, he’s there to pick up Lady Bird for Thanksgiving at his grandmother’s place. His grandmother lives in the nicest house on the other side of the tracks and, to feel better about her life, Lady Bird tells her shallow new “bestie” Jenna (Odeya Rush) that it’s Lady Bird’s own house. A miserabilist story about the horror of adolescence that is obviously helmed by a first-timer, Lady Bird is redeemed by a cast so sterling that I actually wished the film were longer. It’s that kind of movie.

mother! (2017)

September 15, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Darren Aronofsky’s mother! seeks to explain the ways of God to Man in an allegory of the monstrousness of the creative impulse that plays at once as apologia and barbaric yawp-cum-mission statement; imagine if Aronofsky adapted Paradise Lost. It’s The Giving Tree and Harlan Ellison’s “Try a Dull Knife” as told by Buñuel and Ken Russell: a marriage of essential truth with exceptional excess–a work of genuine arrogance and pretension. The picture aspires to answer large questions, to lay bare the heart of the artist, and it has as few apologies to offer as it does fucks to give. It’s unpleasant to the point of unwatchability–an instant entry into the films maudit hall of fame, predicting a popular failure and critical evisceration that are at least in part something Aronofsky must have expected, given how dedicated mother! is to destroying pleasure, to refusing the breast that its unnamed female protagonist (we’ll call her X, in honour of Joan Fontaine’s similarly anonymous heroine from Rebecca), played by Jennifer Lawrence, offers her infant in one of the multifarious religious tableaux that litter the piece. In fact, were the film a river to be crossed, the stones you’d step on would all be depictions of holy martyrs and Madonnas. In this way, it resembles Children of Men–even through to its long urban war and siege sequence, which mother! replicates during its feverish conclusion. It resembles Viridiana, of course, and The Exterminating Angel. It resembles all the great symbolist films because it’s one of them.

Telluride ’17: First They Killed My Father

September 13, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Telluride, Telluride 2017

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
***½/****
starring Sreymoch Sareum, Kompheak Phoeung, Socheata Sveng, Dara Heng
screenplay by Loung Ung & Angelina Jolie
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw Angelina Jolie gets a lot of shit for being Angelina Jolie. She’s mocked for adopting children from places in the world that need more kindness and attention. Her behaviour as a young woman is brought up constantly to shame her. Her recent separation from Brad Pitt is held up as proof of…something. I haven’t liked her previous films as director, but I saw no malice in them. I suggested after Unbroken that she should stop making movies, maybe focus on her philanthropy. It’s a good thing I don’t know what I’m talking about. First They Killed My Father, adapted from Loung Ung’s memoir by Ung herself (with Jolie), is a beautiful, elliptical, child’s-eye war film that lands somewhere between Empire of the Sun and Come and See. Jolie is the prime example of a child of extreme privilege who has awakened to that privilege, who still stumbles now and again in her more self-aggrandizing moments but for all that hasn’t started a weird product catalogue and advised women to steam their vagina. It’s galling to hear about sensitivity from someone who’s new to it, I think; easier to go after her for an acting exercise reported in VANITY FAIR where she had auditioning Cambodian children hold money, ask them what they would use the money for, and then ask them to react to the money being taken away from them. Who could defend that sort of cruelty? No one could. I’m doubtful it happened that way.

Telluride ’17: Darkest Hour

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

***/****
starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Anthony McCarten
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Joe Wright’s propulsive, compelling, awards-season prestige biopic Darkest Hour finds Gary Oldman in fine fettle, delivering a rousing performance as WWII-era Winston Churchill, from the moment of his usurpation of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) for the Prime Minister-ship through to the beginning of the evacuation of Dunkirk. It’s a film about the suddenly-controversial position of not appeasing Nazis and the importance of rhetoric as a skill in our leadership. (Churchill uses Cicero as reference material.) It’s about principles and erudition. A shame that both seem suddenly in such short supply. When Churchill addresses Parliament in his famous “We will never surrender” speech, chief political rival Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) mutters that Winston’s just mobilized the English language. Trapped as we are now as a nation under an illiterate, sub-human moron and Nazi sympathizer who is some combination of demented and narcissistic, I confess I got emotional a time or two imagining there were once leaders in the world of whom we could be proud and behind whom we could rally. A shame that it seems so much like quaint science-fiction as we work through our forever-war scenarios and jockey for battle against Southeast Asia again. Darkest Hour, in other words, feels aspirational rather than historical, finding its greatest tensions in the disagreement within Churchill’s war council over whether or not the British Empire should “hear out” the Nazis in order to avoid conflict, or whether they should make a stand and, should they be defeated, at least be defeated knowing the empire stood for something. Churchill says that great civilizations that fought and were conquered tend to rise again–but civilizations that capitulate tend to be swallowed by history. Call Darkest Hour a warning about the poison diminishing the United States, though I doubt we’re listening.

Telluride ’17: Wonderstruck

September 9, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Mystery, Telluride, Telluride 2017

**½/****
starring Oakes Fegley, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Millicent Simmonds
screenplay by Brian Selznick, based on his book
directed by Todd Haynes

by Walter Chaw I like the way Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck moves. It glides from one vignette to the next, one setting to another, one era to a previous one. It shifts from a 1977-set Times Square scored by that Deodato disco remix of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the one Hal Ashby used for Chauncey’s first stroll in Being There) to a silent movie where a deaf/mute girl (Millicent Simonds) looks for her mother (Julianne Moore), a silent film star who’s apparently left her behind for the bright lights, big city. Based on Brian Selznick’s children’s novel, just like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Wonderstruck suffers from the same problem as Scorsese’s film: mainly, that it’s based on a kid’s book that’s mostly pictures and therefore plotted around a central twist neither surprising nor instructive. It is simultaneously too much for what it is, and not enough. I still like the way Wonderstruck moves, though, as Haynes stakes his claim again as the king of winsome nostalgia, telling the story of poor little Ben (Oakes Fegley), who’s just lost his mother, Elaine (Michelle Williams), but not before (in flashback) she’s refused to tell Ben who his father is. She does, however, make him interested in David Bowie before she goes, so it could be worse.

It (2017)

September 7, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

It: Chapter One
****/****
starring Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw There’s a girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis), she must be around thirteen or so, she’s standing in front of a wall of tampons at the drugstore, trying to make a decision on her own because her dad (Stephen Bogaert) is alone, and a creep, you know, a little scary in how he keeps asking her if she’s still his “little girl.” So she has to do this by herself, even though it’s embarrassing–but she’s doing it. The next aisle over, a few boys, they call themselves “The Losers” because why not, everyone else does, are gathering medical supplies to help the new kid, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who’s been cut up pretty bad by bully Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). They need a distraction because they don’t have enough money to pay, so Bevvie provides one, and now she’s a “Loser,” too. I read Stephen King’s It in September of 1986, when I was thirteen. Thirteen exactly the age of its heroes in the “past” of the book, the flashback portion that’s paralleled with the kids, as adults, called back to the Derry, ME of their youth, where they had forgotten that, once upon a time, they fought a thing and won. There is nothing better when you’re thirteen than Stephen King. It was my favourite book for a while, although I didn’t entirely understand why. I think I might now. Better, I believe Andy Muschietti, director of the underestimated Mama, and his team of three screenwriters, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, understand that what works about It isn’t the monster, but the fear of childhood as it metastasizes into the fear of adulthood–and how those two things are maybe not so different after all.

Telluride ’17: The Shape of Water

September 6, 20172017, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017, Thriller

***/****
starring Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I watched Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water in a packed auditorium in Telluride, CO as a torrential rainstorm pounded the roof of what is, outside of the festival, an ice-skating rink, perched there with a park in front of it, the headwaters of the San Miguel to one side and the mountains to the other and all around. As the main character, cleaning lady Eliza (Sally Hawkins), turned on water for her bath, the cascading cacophony in the theatre joined in with a warm insularity I always equate with the Mandarin term for "cozy": two words that mean, or at least sound like they mean, "warm" and "noisy." The Shape of Water is like that, too, a gothic romance in the new del Toro style (after Crimson Peak, which, for me, was more noisy than warm, but mileage varies), which del Toro introduced as the evocation of a fantasy he had as a child upon watching Creature from the Black Lagoon in which the Creature falls in love with the girl and they live happily ever after. That's it, and were that truly it, The Shape of Water would be an instant classic rather than an acquired taste, perhaps–a future cult classic, certainly, that is forgiven for its odd digressions while justly-celebrated for its audacity. It's a triumph when it focuses in on the essential loneliness of misfits (the melancholic, Romanticist engine that drives del Toro's Hellboy movies), but in a subplot involving Russian spies, it becomes for long minutes time spent away from what works in favour of time spent with what doesn't. When del Toro has allowed intrusions like this in the past (see: his early masterpieces The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth), it's been up to us to infer the connection between his dark fables and his political concerns. Here he brings the subtext into text at a cost to the "warm/noisy" coziness of his work. For del Toro, insularity is a strength.

Telluride ’17: Battle of the Sexes

September 5, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2017

½*/****
starring Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman
written by Simon Beaufoy
directed by Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton

by Walter Chaw A movie that will make no one uncomfortable while reassuring the most blinkered that they’ve given at the office, Battle of the Sexes could be directed by anyone, star anyone, and it would still be exactly the same edgeless, meaningless, obsequious, instantly-obsolete artifact, desperate to be loved, expecting to be feted come awards season. It’s the casserole recipe that won in 1950, and Emma Stone continues her terrifying run as Audrey Hepburn’s career by ticking off her Children’s Hour/LGBTQ-sensitivity check-box. Stone’s blank, not “effortless” but rather “not trying” and “under-written” performance, is essentially a black wig, glasses, and a half-open pucker. Her Billie Jean King is a cipher who mouths platitudes about “equality” when what she really means is that she’s a vacuous narcissist who steamrolls everyone trying to help her in a movie that is, in fact, as woman-hating as the men it sets up as straw…well, men. To be clear, Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in an exhibition match does not mean that women and men are “equal.” It doesn’t mean they’re unequal, either. It actually means nothing. Indeed, that King, at the age of 29, in peak condition and at the pinnacle of her profession and training hard, beat a 55-year-old former world champion whom the film takes pains to reassure is not only not training, but also drinking and womanizing and popping mysterious pills while doing a full-blitz promotional campaign (he played the entire first set in a branded windbreaker), says the opposite, I think, of the intended message. Understand that at this point in the sport, in 2017, it’s not controversial that women and men do not compete at the same level. You’re getting mad, I can tell. This is Serena Williams, the undisputedly greatest woman tennis player in the history of the sport, in 2013 on “Late Night with David Letterman”:

Telluride ’17: downsizing

September 3, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Satire, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2017, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Hong Chau, Christoph Waltz
written by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Imagine if Tracy Flick, the energetic, demonic high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s brilliant Election, were a Vietnamese exchange student, heavily and hilariously accented. That’s one of the things wrong with Payne’s excruciating downsizing, a film that takes his now-trademark twee misanthropy and mashes it up against this pretense of Swiftian social satire that sets the Sisyphus-like struggle of the bedraggled Everyman against a fatalistic backdrop of environmental apocalypse. It’s a broad discourse on a lot of things: poverty and the failure of capitalism; the United States tearing itself apart along arbitrary class distinctions politicized into dramas of dominance and oppression. It’s also about a filmmaker using science-fiction as a cudgel, swinging it about as disrespectfully as he does extreme racial caricaturing and destined to hold it up as a shield when whatever opposition comes rolling in to protest a film that mainstream publications out of Venice are already proclaiming some kind of contemporary masterpiece. It’s like George Lucas all over again, but imagine if it were like Charlie Kaufman instead. For me, when you have an Asian character as problematic as Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a figure set up as both an object of derision and a holy relic, everything else is drowned out in that noise.

Check – Telluride 2017 Intro

September 2, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2017

by Walter Chaw

Things to do in Telluride:

Go to the thrift store on the main street. There’s always something there–old festival gear, glass-framed posters, sweatshirts (because it’s never not colder here than you expect it to be). Especially go there at night after the trams stop running and you’re walking in the pitch black on the side of a mountain. I’ve done this without a flashlight and with a dead cell phone and it’s terrifying. Also, there’s no air. Also, there are bears.

The Dark Tower (2017)

August 6, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, Western

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King’s revered Dark Tower series, I’d probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence’s Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-’90s–the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”, Jamie Delano’s “Animal Man”, Grant Morrison’s “Doom Patrol”, and Delano/Garth Ennis’s “Hellblazer”, which of course formed the basis for Lawrence’s picture. But I don’t. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn’t jibe with images and rhythms I’d conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should’ve cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he’s been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won’t you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake’s parents’ kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he’s from, there’s no chicken.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

July 30, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones
screenplay Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, written by Antony Johnson and illustrated by Sam Hart
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Essentially No Way Out with less hot sex but better action sequences, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde is a lot of truly dreary Cold War spy intrigue interrupted periodically, but not often enough, by the good stuff. It proposes the antiquated notion that collusion with the Russians is treason in having heroic MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron–Mr. F after all, all this time) take ice baths and try to figure out who mysterious mole "Satchel" is in the last days of East Berlin. Her contact there is skeezy Percival (James McAvoy) whose handlers fear has gone a bit "feral" in the field. We're introduced to him trading Jim Beam and blue jeans for information and waking up with two girls (two!) to pick up Lorraine at the airport. There's also a French spy named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) who offers up a Sapphic love interest for Lorraine and ends up the way that lovers end up in spy movies. Leitch, an uncredited co-director on John Wick, brings the same style of kinetic, close-in martial arts and, eventually, gunplay of that film, but missteps badly by, among other things, making this about more than avenging a dead dog. Without an emotional charge–and there isn't enough of one generated by the loss of two of Lorraine's lovers–there's no real sense of emotion or energy in the action scenes. They're super cool, don't get me wrong (at least they are until Leitch decides at the very end to overuse slow motion), but they lack motivation and investment. But that's the least of Atomic Blonde's problems.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 24, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mystery, New Zealand, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

July 22, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer
written for the screen and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw Effortlessly, almost guilelessly sexist in the way that only a 12-year-old with lacklustre breeding can be, Luc Besson’s latest opus of antsy expressionism, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (hereafter Valerian), is so relentlessly puerile, so unapologetically awful, that there’s absolutely no chance it won’t become a midnight masterpiece. Not one of the good ones, like Besson’s own The Fifth Element or The Professional (or The Messenger, curiously the most historically accurate Joan of Arc film), but one of the ones that are the feature-length equivalent of that repetitive noise your 9-year-old son makes when you’re driving him to a friend’s house. It’s an interminable adaptation of the Ruby Rhod sequence from The Fifth Element, an endurance test of unusual cruelty and imagination. If you’re sensing some grudging admiration for it, you’re not wrong. It’s like going to a torture museum and marvelling at the level of invention and craftsmanship dedicated to the methods to which humans go to discomfit one another. Some of that sadistic shit is worth millions–priceless, even.