Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 32 of 146

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 14, 20182017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
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.

It (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 13, 2018****/****, 2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Stephen King

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

It: Chapter One
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
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.

The Post (2017)

January 12, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

**/****
starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk
written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Two scenes. The first a posh dinner where Spielberg subtly changes the field of focus to show that the ostensible star of this show, WASHINGTON POST publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), is listening in on a conversation recklessly shared in her presence. (It’s at once a subtle presentation of gender dynamics and a master class in visual storytelling.) The second a shot of Graham descending the steps in slow-motion to rapturous, feminine approval following a Supreme Court victory. Both are vintage Spielberg, the best technical filmmaker the medium has ever produced and a big giant, sentimental, cotton-headed ninny-muggins who can’t leave the audience to their own devices and doesn’t have the muscle to end things on a down note. When he manages one, his films are nigh well perfection. When he doesn’t–and he hasn’t, really, since Munich or maybe Catch Me If You Can–his films are 90% the best thing you’ve ever seen and 10% the worst. That’s good enough for most. For me, it’s the fantastic six-course feast that ends when you find a cockroach in the flan.

“The 50 Best Films of 2017” by Walter Chaw

January 10, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

There’s one good thing that came out of the first year of the Trump presidency, just one: this realization that what we had always indulged in terms of masculine misbehaviour is dangerous and vile. The entertainment industry, the lowest arm of which gave us Trump, took the brunt of the new “wokeness,” almost as though it were taking responsibility for birthing something like Trump by enacting a purge. It’s not over. One can only hope the enablers are next–the ones who looked the other way or silently helped normalize a flesh tax for entrance into the realm. Change has to be more than lip-service and the now-familiar tone-deaf apology for narcissism and incomprehension. I could go deeper here about my personal dismay, sense of betrayal, rage, disgust…and I want to–but men have been talking over women about their experiences for long enough.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

December 24, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan
screenplay by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinker, based on the book Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw Inexplicably named after a Guns N' Roses song, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (henceforth Jumanji 2) is a deeply problematic film that castrates its smartest ideas in order to please the broadest possible audience on opening weekend before dragging itself off somewhere to show up in a Redbox in a few months' time. Start with Kevin Hart–reunited with his Central Intelligence co-star, Dwayne Johnson–playing a porter, essentially, in a jungle adventure. Which, you know…what the actual fuck? I'm sure it means well, and Hart's threadbare shtick of being short and put-upon certainly fits the situation, but there's opportunity here, should director Jake Kasdan have chosen to take it, for Hart to comment on how degrading it is for a star of his stature to be appearing in a movie as Bagger Vance. He doesn't seem to notice there's baggage related to his playing a character who essentially carries a bag and hands weapons to the hero. He complains about it, though mostly he complains about not being able to run very fast and having one of his avatar's weaknesses be pound cake.

Dunkirk (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

December 19, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, DVD, France, Netherlands, UK, War

*½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I’m a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don’t like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there’s a real heart in there. It’s a bad science-fiction movie, but it’s a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it’s puffed-up full of itself, and it’s about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It’s going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It’s like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

December 13, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
***/****
starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Benicio Del Toro
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Walter Chaw I wrestled for a long time with this review. Not what I would write but whether I should write it at all. I consider director Rian Johnson to be a friend. He’s kind, smart, true, and unaffected despite having been handed the reins to the most revered American mythology–save for becoming somehow more humble during the course of it. In the middle of a period in which everyone in the business, it seems, is being outed as a cad, Rian is something like hope that there are good and decent men left. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (hereafter The Last Jedi) is every inch his movie. It’s about hope, see, and hope is the word that’s repeated most often in his script. By the end of it, he suggests that hope can even grow from salted earth. It’s a beautifully-rendered image as open, guileless-unto-corny, and genuine as Rian is. I don’t love everything in the film, but I do love Rian and The Last Jedi as a whole. In a franchise this venerated and valuable, it’s ballsy as fuck that he decided to do his own thing and that Disney let him. Now they’ve decided to invest another $600M or so in letting him do his own thing some more.

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

December 1, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw There are three young women in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (hereafter Three Billboards)–four if you include Abbie Cornish as Woody Harrelson’s twenty-years-his-junior wife–and two of them (or three) are absolute fucking idiots and the third was raped while dying and then set on fire with gasoline. As a man who has been told often lately that it’s not his place to talk about these things, I’ll leave it at that. I didn’t think it was funny when the 19-year-old girl (Samantha Weaving) dating the abusive shit-fuck ex-husband (John Hawkes) of our anti-heroine, Mildred (Frances McDormand), is used as an object of derision/tension-breaker, and I didn’t think it was funny when secretary Pamela (Kerry Condon) is treated identically before getting punched in the face as her exit from the film. (I’m not mentioning the girl Mildred kicks in the crotch because the trailer spoiled it.) I also have a hard time with a scene where Cornish’s Anne berates Mildred for something she knows very well didn’t happen (or should know, anyway), which just goes on and on in the McDonagh fashion. Maybe it’s that there’s this cast of actors here whom I’ve loved, almost without exception, in everything I’ve seen them in and now they’re suddenly all terrible in exactly the same way. It doesn’t take talent to make a bad movie, but it takes a lot of talent to make a movie that’s bad like this. Or maybe a lot of arrogance. McDonagh, to his credit, has been doing it since the beginning–a real auteur.

Hana-bi (1998) – Blu-ray Disc

November 5, 2017****/****, 1990s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, Revenge, Romance, Thriller

Fireworks
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Beat Takeshi, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima
written and directed by Takeshi Kitano

by Walter Chaw Nishi loves her very much, but when she tries to link arms with him for a photograph, he pulls away. He’s not comfortable with his emotions. He’s from both a culture and a profession that frowns on that sort of thing. When his co-workers talk about him, they do so in hushed tones and warn one another not to get too familiar, even in their gossip. He’s lost a daughter and his wife is very ill. They make allowances for him one day, and it results in the crippling of his partner. Nishi avenges him, but another young cop dies in the process. Nishi, dispassionate, empties his gun into the bad guy’s skull. But his partner is still abandoned by his wife and child for not being the man he used to be. None of this is how it’s supposed to work. Men are taught to be a specific way and promised rewards for their stoicism and brutality. I’m 44 years old. It’s taken most of my adult life to begin to unravel the ways that expectation and breeding have made it hard for me to tell my wife, whom I love in a devastating way, “I love you.” I was afraid to have kids because I didn’t know if I could tell them I loved them. I have two. I tell them every day. I make myself. Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi deals with the consequences of masculinity–perhaps the most trenchant exploration of the theme not written or directed by Walter Hill. The film understands that some men can only express themselves through motion, which isn’t enough in the best of times and is laughably insufficient in the worst of them. Of all the ’90s masterpieces of world cinema, Hana-bi is my favourite.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

November 1, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins
written by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw I’ve reached a limit with facility, I think–a point at which things that are professionally executed and entirely meaningless just slide off into a kind of instant nothingness. I’m talking about machine-tooled product, a brand like Kleenex or Kellogg’s, where the only time there’s any awareness of consumption is when the experience of it is unexpected in some way. There’s a reason people see the Virgin Mary in potato chips sometimes. Variation in extruded products is so exceedingly rare that it’s akin to holy visitation: some accidental proof of the supernatural; a glitch in the Matrix. Marvel films are akin now to your daily lunch. You can remember the stray meal. Mostly, it’s something you do knowing you’ve had one yesterday and are likely to have one tomorrow. If you’re like most of us, you could probably eat better.

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

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.