Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 34 of 149

FrightFest ’18: “All the Water is Holy” – FFC Interviews ‘The Devil’s Doorway’ Director Aislinn Clarke

August 22, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Interviews, UK

by Walter Chaw There are some things that horror does better than any other genre. At its best, there’s no equal to its ability to surf the zeitgeist, to reflect what a culture fears and offer proximate and ultimate exorcisms. Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway is an intensely personal piece that works as metaphor in a few broad sociological conversations, covering the continued atrocity of the Catholic Church’s systemic protection of predators among its ranks in addition to the broader tradition of male control over and exploitation of a woman’s sexuality. Set in 1960, it even riffs, extra-textually, on that year’s revolution in cinema, which saw the release of uncomfortable, status-disturbing pictures like Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, Peeping Tom, Jingoku, Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, and Black Sunday. Jung had this idea that if you repress something hard enough and for long enough, it becomes monstrous eventually and explodes into consciousness. The 1950s were a pressure cooker in many ways, and 1960 was the release. The Devil’s Doorway is a release, too, in that it confronts directly and indirectly Ireland’s dark Magdalene Laundry/Asylum legacy whilst seeking, in the person of a world-weary (doubting) Father Thomas, to make some sort of peace at last with our complicity in the machineries of oppression. Whatever the priest’s non-Pyrrhic spoils, they’re hard-won and long-in-coming.

First Reformed (2018) – Blu-ray + Digital

August 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Romance

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

The Ranger (2018)

August 18, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Chloe Levine, Granit Lahu, Jeremy Pope, Jeremy Holm
written by Jenn Wexler, Giaco Furino
directed by Jenn Wexler

by Walter Chaw Jenn Wexler’s hyphenate debut is anchored by a tremendous performance from Chloe Levine–good enough that it peanut-butters over some of The Ranger‘s thematic gaps, its troubles with pacing and its identity crisis. The picture opens well, with a group of punks–of which Levine’s Chelsea is a reluctant member–raising hell and eventually killing a cop. Chelsea takes her buddies to her uncle’s cabin to hide. We’re introduced to the cabin in the film’s prologue as a stolid Ranger (Jeremy Holm) comforts young Chelsea (Jete Laurence) about something terrible while she nibbles on a sandwich. He compares her to a wolf, because she’s “a fighter.” Once removed from the urban environment, Chelsea finds her pals obnoxious: smoking inside, setting fires, painting trees, and generally being disrespectful of the woods in which she was raised. Her boyfriend, Garth (Granit Lahu), is especially the kind of lost youth who desperately deserves to get drop-kicked into a canyon.

FrightFest ’18: An Introduction

August 14, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

by Walter Chaw One of the major misconceptions about film critics and scholars is that they aren't fans of film first, and if they are, then surely they wouldn't be fans of a genre as disreputable as horror. But I've long held that horror is an indicator species in our socio-political quagmire. That often with only limited studio oversight, and because they're entirely possible to execute with a small budget in a short amount of time, horror films, by talking about what a society fears, can tap into the collective unconscious more quickly and effectively than any number of "prestige" presentations. There's a reason most myths and fairy tales have strong horror elements. Get Out is a lot of things, for example, but its closest analogue is George Romero's landmark civil rights masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. I wonder if the horror movie's primal simplicity has anything to do with the disdain with which even its creators sometimes approach it. In any case, horror is important, essential, vital. When it's right, there's not much else righter.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

August 8, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
written by Charlie Wachtel & David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, based on the book by Ron Stallworth
directed by Spike Lee

by Walter Chaw Colorado Springs is a big, modern, beautiful city. It's home to natural wonders like the Tolkien-sounding Garden of the Gods and the Cave of the Winds. Its zoo, perched on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, is world class. Spencer Penrose built a shrine to his friend Will Rogers on that same mountain when Rogers died in a plane crash. Cheyenne Mountain is also where NORAD is housed, and Colorado Springs is also host to the United States Air Force Academy and, once upon a time, Focus on the Family. It's an ultra-conservative city just south of blue Denver, which is itself south of the trust-fund hippie commune of Boulder. And for a few years starting around 1925, there was no greater stronghold for the Klan in the United States than in Denver. In 1978, Ron Stallworth became the first African-American police officer hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department, and then the first detective when he went undercover to infiltrate a Kwame Ture speech at a black nightclub. In 1979, he answered an ad hoping to establish a chapter of the KKK in the Springs, posing over the telephone as a man who hated every non-white race, but especially "those blacks." A white counterpart attended meetings while Stallworth eventually gained the trust of then-Grand Wizard David Duke. Duke reached out to Stallworth recently because he was concerned he was going to be portrayed as a buffoon in Spike Lee's adaptation of Stallworth's memoir, BlacKkKlansman. I mean, if the hood fits… If there is one indicator of involvement with cults like this, it's deep-seated insecurity. It bears mentioning that Denver's old airport, Stapleton International Airport, is the namesake of five-time Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton, who was a high-ranking member and, until the end of his reign, vocal supporter of the Klan. The airport is gone, but the neighbourhood that replaced it still carries his name.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Born of Woman (short films)

August 6, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Finland, Horror, Ireland, Norway, Sci-Fi, Short Films, South Korea, Thriller

by Walter Chaw This is what I believe: I believe that men and women are essentially different and that those differences result in perspectives that are necessarily different. I don't consciously privilege one perspective over the other, but I acknowledge that I am not always aware of my prejudices. I think Wonder Woman would have been garbage if a man had directed it; and I think 20th Century Women, written and directed by a man, had beautiful roles for women. It's confusing and it can be exhausting, but at the end of the day, creating an equal opportunity for women and people of colour to tell stories (whether they're theirs or not) can only be good. So…

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

July 28, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw As the title flatly states, Mission: Impossible: Fallout (hereafter Fallout), the sixth instalment in our very own Jackie Chan’s signature series, will be about Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) emotional baggage, earned over twenty-plus years of saving the world from threats foreign, domestic, and auteur. The main personal casualty for Hunt is the disintegration of his marriage to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who must remain a “ghost” so that she doesn’t suffer the, yes, fallout from Ethan’s hero work. She checks in every once in a while, Hunt’s teammate Luther (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan’s new flame, former MI6 agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). It’s what keeps Ethan going. Accordingly, Fallout starts with an apocalyptic dream of Julia in the hands of maddog terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)–the type of dream James Cameron used so effectively in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where everyone turns to charcoal and flies apart. It’s important to focus in on all of this because Fallout is about a very specific element of the myth of masculinity, this romanticizing of sacrifice and suffering that men must go through in order to protect the women in their lives. The best part of Martin Campbell’s extremely good Casino Royale is when fatale Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) brings Bond (Daniel Craig) back from the dead and his first sentence is spent asking if she’s okay. There’s a scene like that at the end of Fallout as well when Hunt, back from the dead, apologizes to Julia for everything. It’s the sentiment and the situation that makes men in the audience spring a manly leak. Hunt–even his name is a primordial gender assignation–is the avatar for male expectation, which casts his heroics in an odd light, I think: fantasies of male heroism played against grandiose, extravagant, paranoid delusions. I don’t know now if I’m talking about Cruise or Hunt. Same, same.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Rondo

July 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Drew Barnhardt by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party…

The Equalizer 2; The First Purge; Superfly (2018)

July 26, 20182018, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

THE EQUALIZER 2
**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo
written by Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

THE FIRST PURGE
**/****
starring Y’lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by James DeMonaco
directed by Gerard McMurray

SuperFly
**½/****
starring Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Michael Kenneth Williams, Lex Scott Davis
written by Alex Tse, based on the screenplay by Phillip Fenty
directed by Director X

by Walter Chaw McCall (Denzel Washington) is Batman. He has a tragic past and a tortured rationale, a sense of morality in a fallen world that aligns him with the hardboiled detectives proliferating American popular culture in the immediate aftermath of WWII. He was Dirty Harry Callahan or Paul Kersey in the late-’70s-into-’80s. No coincidence Death Wish has already gotten its own remake. No coincidence, either, a series interested in a theoretical near-future in which a day of mayhem is sanctioned by the government in order to facilitate a “purging” of intra-cultural aggression has received four instalments and an upcoming television series. The latest, The First Purge, serves as a “prequel” to the events of the first film. It’s also, full confession, the first of these movies that I’ve seen. I thought the premise was interesting, don’t get me wrong, I just didn’t really have the stomach for it. I feel the same way about that new Mr. Rogers documentary, or The Cove. The world is awful. I get it. There’s a limit to how often I want to be reminded of what we’ve lost. What’s curious about The First Purge (and the Superfly reboot) is not that all its heroes (save one) are Black and all its villains are white, but rather that its relationship to something like The Equalizer 2 mimics the relationship between “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World”. One provides a kind of cross-cultural reassurance that minorities are interested in the restoration of the ruling culture; the other understands the ruling culture was never threatened in the first place. Sure, subcultures evolve in the shadow of the social order, but the social order itself remains implacable and immutable.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Cam

July 21, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

**/****screenplay by Isa Mazzeidirected by Daniel Goldhaber by Walter Chaw Daniel Goldhaber's e-take on the doppelgänger mythos via Harlan Ellison's "Shatterday," Clive Barker's "Mortal Remains," and that second-season episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" called "The Case of Mr. Pelham," asks what could happen if the Internet developed the ability to clone anyone once they uploaded enough extant video footage. Of course this is already mostly possible, and of course this new technology's main utility has been creating celebrity-fakes porn--which Cam addresses, though not well. It looks good and hero Lola ("She was a showgirl") is game, but while it threatens…

You Were Never Really Here (2018) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 16, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Lynne Ramsay, based on the book by Jonathan Ames
directed by Lynne Ramsay

by Walter Chaw It opens with a child’s voice saying that he must do better. It’s dark. The first image is of a man trying to breathe inside a plastic bag. This is your everyday Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), and this is how director Lynne Ramsay lets us know that he’s disturbed. We know he’s dangerous, too, because she shows him cleaning the head of a ball-peen hammer and flushing bloody towels down a hotel-room toilet in a visceral call-back to the nightmare’s resolution in The Conversation. All of You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare: a vision of the United States presented by a foreign artist who sees America in the truest way since Wim Wenders’s pictures about violence, Edward Hopper (whom Ramsey uses as a touchstone, too), and the state of the American dream state. When she evokes “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” (a.k.a. Whistler’s Mother), capturing Joe’s mother (Judith Roberts) in profile through a window as her son goes to collect some bounty, it’s sad in the ineffable way that great art can be in just a pass, a glance. Ramsey’s picture is about the toll of violence on the violator and the victim in equal measure. In moments, she recreates Michael Mann’s urban veneers–nowhere more so than during the title sequence, whose soundtrack evokes not only that halcyon period in the ’80s when Tangerine Dream seemed to be scoring all the best movies, but also the band specifically in how their best scores were about the repetitive urgency of work. Jonny Greenwood’s music for You Were Never Really Here provides subtext, texture, and emotional geography. It reminds of Jon Brion’s work on Punch-Drunk Love. In a lot of ways, that PT Anderson film, in its discussion of a disturbed and volatile young man finding purpose and acceptance, is this picture’s closest analogue.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

July 7, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer
written and directed by Boots Riley

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Boots Riley’s hyphenate debut Sorry to Bother You–it happens in the last third of the picture–that rang so pure and true to me I felt adrenalized, known, inspired. The best art does that: locates that juncture between expression and activism. I felt it during Get Out as I began to recognize the parties where I’d been the only minority guest and somehow also the guest of honour; I hope to feel it one day while watching something about the Asian-American experience. I’d always wondered about the black community coalescing around bootlegs of Seventies kung fu movies, but now I understand it as I find myself vibing to Janelle Monae’s and Childish Gambino’s energetic, pithy counterculture activism. Sorry to Bother You belongs to this moment of crisis. It’s a withering indictment of capitalism and the white ruling class in the United States as it’s metastasized into a machine that’s only ever interested in consuming its weakest, most underrepresented members. The running joke involves prison/work programs dressed up as a way for entire subsistence, formerly middle-class families to sell their lives to the proverbial “company store.” “WorryFree” promises freedom in endless toil. The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz and on the gate at Dachau promised something similar with “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”). In this way, the for-profit prison system in the land of the free is presented for mockery and shame. The idea that the corporate structure in the United States is akin to a prison is raised, too. If films are an empathy machine, this one is the “uncomfortable recognition generator” piece of it. These past eighteen months have been sobering for a lot of my white friends. Sorry to Bother You is a summary of what, until Trump, was easy to sweep under the carpet.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

June 23, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by J.A. Bayona

by Walter Chaw The first time I remember seeing the news crawl at the bottom of a TV screen used as a satirical device in a film was in Jonathan Demme’s still-exceptional, suddenly-current remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (hereafter Fallen Kingdom), after a grim opening sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film, a news ticker declares that the “U.S. President” questions the existence of dinosaurs in the first place. It’s a well-placed barb in the flank of the white evangelical monster that’s swallowed the United States in a dystopia founded on equal parts massive ignorance and fear of an angry white god–one that has installed a demented con-man, and possibly the worst human being in a country teeming with bad human beings, as its golden calf. Hidden away in this pricey fifth instalment of a billion-dollar franchise is a Spanish Gothic fairytale of the titular “fallen kingdom”–the United States, n’est-ce pas?–that owes a lot more to Bayona’s debut The Orphanage than to any of the previous films in the Jurassic series. It plays like Cronos, and it serves the same immediate function as George Romero’s Day of the Dead, up to porting over the “Bub” subplot on the back of a sentient dino named “Blue.” Where its immediate predecessor was a misogynistic funhouse paced to the story/action structure of a porno, Fallen Kingdom is stately to the point of reserved; immensely weird; and overtly critical of the current state of affairs. I’m not sure it’s a good dinosaur movie, but it’s an angry, swollen-red metaphor. All things being equal, I guess I’ll take angry.

Hereditary (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne
written and directed by Ari Aster

by Walter Chaw There’s a feeling nagging at the back of my head that writer-director Ari Aster doesn’t have another round in his chamber–that Hereditary, his feature-length debut, is a canny Frankenstein’s monster of great horror moments sewn together expertly onto the trunk of Ordinary People. What I’m saying is that it literalizes the familial demons of Ordinary People, and in so doing diminishes them. It’s a cheap, mean cop-out. It’s an altogether ignoble thing for supernatural horror to be the literal, not metaphorical, explanation for familial dysfunction. There’s a definite lack of ownership involved here, and the tremendous cast is thus betrayed by the film in which they find themselves. Reckless, feckless, the very definition of nihilistic, Hereditary is a marvellous technical achievement that feels too much like a calling card and too little like the cri de cœur I think it’d like you to believe it is. Even in the middle of its harrowing ending (and it is harrowing, don’t get me wrong), there was a moment I stepped out of the film for a second to admire how “clean” it felt: a movie about the worst things you can ever imagine that I’d feel pretty good recommending to people. I was reminded of an interview with the late Jonathan Demme conducted around the time of The Silence of the Lambs where he talks about finding the line beyond which you’d lose the audience for being too frank in your depiction of atrocity. Hereditary is calculated in the same way. It’s the movie about the unspeakable that everyone can agree on; the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland, renamed “My Mother Never Loved Me.” It’s a fun ride, but it leaves a weird aftertaste. In many ways, Hereditary is the quintessential horror film of the Trump administration.

Incredibles 2 (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Around the midpoint of Brad Bird’s fantastic Incredibles 2, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) catches his son Dash (Huck Milner) on Dash’s way to the bus and pointedly tucks his homework in his backpack. Yes. This happens. This happens every day of the school-year with my 11-year-old son, who is bright, funny, and kind, and can’t for the life of him remember to put his completed homework in his freaking backpack. There are dozens of moments in Incredibles 2 like this. They’re small, throwaway character bits that would’ve taken hours or days to animate and voice correctly, and the real thrill of a movie like this–of any Pixar or Miyazaki when they’re clicking–is little moments like these. In Princess Mononoke, for instance, the prince crouches to take a drink from a stream, but before he does so, he loops his bow over his head and under his arm in a completely natural gesture that would be invisible but for its meaningful utility: this guy has spent a lot of time in the woods, drinking from springs and using his bow. It’s biography conveyed almost subliminally in under a second. In Incredibles 2, a breathless Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) calls from a hotel room upon getting “reinstated” as a superhero in this universe where being super is illegal, after which she bursts excitedly into the story of her day while stay-at-home dad Mr. Incredible makes the right noises and turns on the television. The film is wise to cultural/gender issues that can arise when the woman is the breadwinner; to teen girls in daughter Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) efforts to get a boy to notice her (I have a teen girl, too; it’s spot on); and to an American’s unique social programming, which says that anyone can be anything through the power of belief and effort. Not for nothing, the villain of the first film is the manifestation of toxic fandom in the schlubby body of a white guy calling/diagnosing himself “Syndrome.”

A Wrinkle in Time (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 6, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine
screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle
directed by Ava DuVernay

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Lights, another, much better film featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (directed by another woman of colour, Gina Prince-Bythewood), there is a moment where her character decides to un-straighten her hair and own who she is, damn the torpedoes, and it lands like what a revolution feels like. Or, at least, it lands like what a personal epiphany feels like. In Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, a little white boy named Calvin (Pan‘s Levi Miller), with whom heroine Meg (Storm Reid) is creepily smitten, tells her, twice (twice), that he likes her hair, getting an awkward brush off the first time and a shy “thanks” the second. This is what passes for empowerment in a film fixated on empowerment. I think it’s probably a mistake to have Meg’s sense of self-worth hinge on the approval–at least in this cultural moment–of a white dude. There are fraught politics around a black woman’s hair, and A Wrinkle In Time uses it as a cruel tease again when there’s talk by the evil IT (voiced by David Oyelowo) of Meg straightening her locks before being presented with a “perfect” doppelgänger, free of her nerd glasses, glammed up, hair un-kinked, as one possible outcome for her. It’s the key visual metaphor in a film garnering some measure of praise mainly for how it’s not for anyone who is “cynical” (or an adult). That, and its visual audacity–which in any other context would be derided for its overreliance on the same, along with the picture’s anachronistic amateurishness. Turning Reese Witherspoon into a smug piece of salad is probably not the best use of all those millions of dollars.

The 39 Steps (1935) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 22, 2018****/****, 1930s, 2018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Manheim, Godfrey Tearle
adaptation by Charles Bennett, dialogue by Ian Hay, based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Following the success of 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock and his once-inseparable screenwriter Charles Bennett took to adapting John Buchan’s 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps as a breathless, sometimes-madcap chase flick employing a MacGuffin of many possibilities. The picture opens at the vaudeville act of one Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson): ask him a question and he’ll answer it–a human search engine and the centre of a film dealing with the very Hitchcockian theme of performance and how it keeps at bay, uneasily, the teeming chaos beneath the surface. In the middle of his act, a gunshot rings out and the audience, already unruly, crushes for the exits. Men first, old women–one in particular–trampled in the panic. Hitchcock’s cosmology is aligned with Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” suspended as it were above anarchy and animalism by the thinnest of agreements among men to engage in civilization. I don’t think Hitchcock disdains order–I think he mistrusts it. It’s the root of his Wrong Man issues, no less despairing in its fatalism than Edgar Allan Poe’s expectation/fear of premature burial. The critic Howie Movshovitz gave perhaps the best, certainly the most succinct, summary of Hitchcock’s world of Catholic transference and Original Sin: “Everyone’s got it coming.”

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

May 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

*/****
starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany
written by Jonathan Kasdan & Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In Roger Ebert’s reviews of the original Star Wars trilogy, he mentions that one of the wonders of this universe is that the droids are thinking, feeling, emotional beings, thus making their torture in Return of the Jedi a visceral thing. In Ron Howard’s expediently-extruded Solo: A Star Wars Story (hereafter Solo), a sassy robot named L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is fused into the Millennium Falcon spacecraft after being murdered in the middle of a slave and prisoner rebellion she’s incited in another interchangeable industrial backwater. I mention this as a point of interest because L3 is the clumsy mouthpiece for broad progressive beliefs in a shockingly-bad script by father-son duo Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. When Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) asks if there’s anything else he can get her as he’s leaving a room, she says, “Equal rights?” It’s that kind of character. The kind usually workshopped out when the screenwriter–one of them, anyway–isn’t the most powerful person in the room. She’s Dobby the House Elf from a storyline smartly left out of the film adaptations of Harry Potter, screaming about “droid rights” during a droid Thunderdome sequence done better in everything (but particularly in A.I.), and there mainly I think so that replacement director Howard can slide his brother Clint into a self-satisfied cameo. So this character, liberating droids and releasing slaves and declaring that she’s found her calling, is fused by a grieving Lando into his spaceship to spend the next eight or nine movies getting punched and abused by her new white masters whenever she doesn’t work right away.

Black Panther (2018) [Cinematic Universe Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

May 15, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis
written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw There are issues Black Panther raises that I’m not equipped to discuss. I don’t understand them. I do understand that its closest analogues are Wonder Woman and Rogue One, in that these are deeply flawed films that, for particular audiences, hold a near-totemic value as representative artifacts. I can’t possibly express the joy and immense satisfaction I felt seeing Asian faces in a Star Wars film. I can’t possibly share in the same joy and sense of satisfaction that women got from Wonder Woman and that African-Americans will likely experience with Black Panther. They are all three films that you only really dislike from a position of privilege, and such is the conundrum of our current discourse. I will say that there are a handful of scenes in Black Panther that are as powerful statements of racial outrage as anything I’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema–that is, in a film that is not otherwise directly about slavery and the African-American experience. During its prologue/creation myth, I gasped at a scene of slaves, chained together, being led onto a slaver’s galley. There are moments so bold (if not reductive) that they’re genuinely breathtaking in their audacious impoliteness. Bold enough that some of my more conservative peers left the screening soon after a particular pronouncement about the legacy of slavery poisoning race relations into the modern day. At the end of it, a character proclaims they’d rather die than live in chains. It couldn’t get balder than that, nor more revolutionary. Yeah, man.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

April 25, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw In the Nineties, DC Comics resurrected a bunch of titles under their “Vertigo” aegis, aiming for, if not more sophisticated, at least more mature storytelling, like Neil Gaiman’s enduring, literary “Sandman” and Grant Morrison’s still-unparalleled run on “Doom Patrol” (starting with issue 19). They were a re-entry for me into comics after a childhood collecting all things “Archie” and a few things “X-Men” and “Spider-Man”. In the fifth issue of Vertigo’s “Animal Man” reboot, Morrison writes a one-off called “The Coyote Gospel” in which Wile E Coyote (essentially) is maimed and murdered in any number of ways, only to painfully regenerate and be maimed and murdered again. I like to imagine sometimes the agony of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, resurrected in endless franchise reboots for the purpose of being killed, Prometheus-like, over and over again. There’s a pathos to it, I think, in the Camus existentialist sense: this emotional detachment where it’s sort of impossible to tell if mom died today or, you know, maybe it was yesterday, one can’t be too sure. Maybe pathos isn’t the right word. Closer to the point is that it’s impossible to really feel anything for characters who cannot die; impossible to feel tension or fear for things that cannot be harmed. Superhero comic books and Marvel films, by extension, broadly simulate the tenets explored by French Existentialism: alienation, the absurd, the lie of freedom, the experience of dread and boredom. The only MCU entry self-aware enough to notice this to date is Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange. Fitting that Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) features so prominently in Avengers: Infinity War.