Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 44 of 146

The Water Diviner (2014)

April 20, 20152015, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Turkey, War

*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan, Cem Yilmaz
screenplay by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios
directed by Russell Crowe

by Walter Chaw The Water Diviner is premium schmaltz. Connoisseurs of such will find its top-shelf qualities to include a Witness-like star-cross’d pas de deux; dead wives and sons; surrogate wives and sons; surrogate father figures fighting, Footloose-like, against oppressive cultures; a Fisher King rescue from insanity; and enough war-movie boilerplate to choke a War Horse. Its direct antecedent is of course Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, except that Gallipoli is something of a masterpiece that balances its war journal with strong characters and a tragic ending in keeping with its grim subject matter. The Water Diviner, on the contrary, is a bodice-ripper chock-a-block with hole-digging and sky-beseeching, along with an Outback dust-storm that points, if the trailers for Mad Max: Fury Road are any indication, to this year’s most inexplicable evidence of zeitgeist.

StageFright (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Thriller

Deliria
StageFright: Aquarius
Bloody Bird
***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Gligorov, John Morghen
screenplay by George Eastman
directed by Michele Soavi

by Walter Chaw After years spent working alongside such luminaries as Joe D’Amato, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento, Michele Soavi made his directorial debut with 1987’s StageFright (onscreen title: StageFright: Aquarius)–not an update of Hitchcock’s underestimated Jane Wyman vehicle, but a carrying of the giallo torch from one generation ostensibly into the next. For the uninitiated, giallo, when done right, is a perpetual-motion machine that runs off its own mysterious energy. Taking its name from the yellow covers of lurid Italian paperbacks, films in this genre split, broadly, into two sub-categories: the ones that give a passing nod to ratiocination; and the ones that don’t bother to make any rational sense at all. StageFright is of the latter school, aligning it with stuff like Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy over something like his Tenebrae (on which Soavi served as second assistant director). Sense is antithetical to StageFright. It’s a vehicle for atmosphere and delivers it in spades.

Don’t Look Now (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2015****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania
screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is about looking, about ways of seeing and layers of understanding. It’s about memory and its intrusion into and influence on current states of being. It’s about the impossibility of faith or love or human relationships to illuminate truth; or it’s about how faith and love and human relationships are the only truth. It shows images out of order, presenting them in ways that will only make sense once the gestalt in which the images exist becomes clear. In every way, Don’t Look Now is designed for multiple viewings. The film warns that a life spent unexamined will end brutally and nonsensically. Without context, there is nothing, but context is nigh impossible before the end. It’s something William Carlos Williams would understand.

Furious 7 (2015)

April 3, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

Furious Seven
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw There’s a death culture surrounding car enthusiasts. Whereas in football if a player dies, their memorabilia tends to go dormant, in NASCAR, the sport’s victims are elevated to sainted martyr: Their bits and pieces become as holy relics, sacrifices to thundering machine gods. Predictably, then, Furious 7 (hereafter F7) will enjoy a lavish critical and popular processional, as freshly-dead Paul Walker (the worst semi-successful American actor, living or deceased) haunts every frame with either his digital ghost or his patented expressionless reaction shots. Finished with a combination of camera trickery, CGI grafts, and Walker’s brothers as ghoulish body-doubles, F7 if nothing else proves that Walker is distractingly lifeless in every scenario, but nobly so in this one.

Get Hard (2015)

March 28, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jay Martel & Ian Roberts and Etan Cohen
directed by Etan Cohen

by Walter Chaw The title pretty much says it all, as screenwriter Etan Cohen’s gay-panic directorial debut Get Hard works as the exact antidote to his own work on the smart, occasionally vital Tropic Thunder. It’s puerile and indelicate–that much to be expected, I suppose, but it’s laboured, too, and flat as a pancake. If Get Hard were a middle-aged man, you’d be calling an ambulance for all the wheezing. Two scenes: in the first, Wall Street wolf James King (Will Ferrell) does a patented Will Ferrell freak-out, mistaking attendant Darnell (Kevin Hart) for a carjacker, ending with Darnell saying, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, man;” in the second, two scary-looking Boyz N the Hood-era gangbangers say, “Wall Street is where the real criminals at!” The former demonstrates how poorly matched are the improvisational styles of the leads, with Ferrell needing a deadpan straight world to his shenanigans; one wonders at the wisdom of casting two alpha-comedians in a film–with no one setting up the jokes, there’s never anything to pay off. (It’s why Jeff Daniels is Jim Carrey’s counterpart in the Dumb and Dumber movies and not Robin Williams.) The latter demonstrates how desperate the film is in trying to be smart and relevant. What could be more sophisticated and racially sensitive, after all, than a screenplay written by a bunch of identical-looking white guys imagining a Los Angeles street gang called the Crenshaw Kings transitioning their drive-by and street-smart jive business into day-trading?

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 23, 20152014, 2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy, New Zealand

Hobbitarmies1

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom
screenplay by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo Del Toro, based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Peter Jackson

by Walter Chaw During the first ten minutes of the first day of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (hereafter Hobbit 3), Smaug dies. I don’t intend this to be a spoiler, because, you know, the book’s been around for almost as long as this movie runs, and Rankin & Bass already adapted it (somehow squeezing Tolkien’s slim volume into one 77-minute animated flick)–but if you don’t read and live under a rock: the dragon dies. This acts as prologue. A better prologue would recap what the hell happened in the first two Hobbits; I appear to have scrubbed them completely from the ol’ memory bank in a heroic act of self-defense. This prologue, by the way, is the key moment in the book, meaning that although the CGI fireworks never let up, the rest of Hobbit 3 is the decline in action to the conclusion.

Run All Night (2015)

March 14, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

Cinderella (2015)

March 14, 20152015, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Lily James, Richard Madden, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Chris Weitz
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw Notable in however these things are notable for not being an Ever After revisionist Cinderella but rather a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Disney animated version, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella would be interesting to look at next to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, if only to see how Helena Bonham Carter morphs from immortal beloved to Fairy Godmother. (Answer? Awkwardly.) It’s not a bad conversation to have, actually, in a film that finds a great deal of depth in Cate Blanchett’s Barbara Stanwyck take on Lady Tremaine, the evil stepmother. In a nicely-played scene, she stops just short of confessing that the reason she resents Cinderella (Lily James) is because, for women, society abhors the aged and venerates the youthful. It’s not deep (and maybe it’s not meant to be), but it does add a little bitter undertaste to its “happily ever after.”

Chappie (2015) + Unfinished Business (2015)

March 8, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

CHAPPIE
*/****
starring Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Sigourney Weaver, Hugh Jackman
screenplay by Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell
directed by Neill Blomkamp

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
**/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, James Marsden
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Ken Scott

by Walter Chaw The schadenfreude winner of the week is Neill Blomkamp’s benighted trainwreck of a fanfic reel Chappie, which presents a horrific tale of how a child raised by art-rap band Die Antwoord would grow to be this unholy Frankenstein of Sharlto Copley and Jar Jar Binks and Gorillaz and a mechanical rabbit. It’s a mess. The completion of the Short Circuit trilogy no one was asking for, it’s also an update of not only the Verhoeven RoboCop, complete with ED-209, but Blomkamp’s own District 9 as well in its themes of class inequality, sentience, and transformation. In its favour is how legendarily irritating the Chappie character is, to the point that when the slo-mo “hero strut” happens in the second half, the compulsion to punch the movie in its neck is nigh irresistible. To its detriment, Chappie purports to have solved the puzzle of digitized sentience, Transcendence-style, and in the process gifted immortality to Björk-lite squeaker Yolandi Visser. That’s at least Fourth Circle of Hell stuff right there.

Focus (2015)

February 26, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Romance, Theatrical, Will Smith

**/****
starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney
written and directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

by Walter Chaw The world’s most polite heist/caper/con-man Charade thing, which feels it’s finally time to continue that death trudge towards completion of a Matchstick Men trilogy, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s Focus is a studiedly-inoffensive star vehicle for Will Smith that’s interesting only because of Will Smith’s casual attitude towards miscegenation. Easy to say that in 2015 a black guy with a white girl isn’t that big a deal, but I still can’t think of too many examples where a superstar like Smith is willing to repeatedly cast himself opposite a cross-racial leading lady. Smith is even a producer of Will Gluck’s intriguing Annie, which, in addition to being a very strange bookend to the surveillance-state nightmare of The Dark Knight, features at its centre an interracial love story between characters played by Jamie Foxx and Rose Byrne. I’m spending a lot of time on this, because Focus, aside from the sexy shenanigans of Smith’s expert con-man Nicky and his ingénue protégé Jess (Margot Robbie) and the fact of their race-mixing in a mainstream, medium-big studio flick, isn’t about anything and isn’t otherwise that interesting about it.

Watership Down (1978) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 25, 20151970s, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Watership1

Richard Adams’s Watership Down
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams
directed by Martin Rosen

by Walter Chaw Unsentimental and terrifying and set against lovely, John Constable-esque watercolour backgrounds, Martin Rosen’s adaptation of the Richard Adams novel Watership Down arose in that extended lull between Disney’s heyday and its late-Eighties resurrection. (This period also saw, in addition to Rosen’s film of Adams’s The Plague Dogs, Rankin & Bass’s The Last Unicorn and Ralph Bakshi’s most productive period, which included 1978’s The Lord of the Rings.) Watership Down points to the dwindled potential for American animation to evolve into what anime has become: a mature medium for artistic expression of serious issues. A shame that this flawed piece is possibly the pinnacle of animation’s ambition on these shores, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life notwithstanding.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

February 15, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Theatrical

*/****
starring Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Strong, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book "The Secret Service" by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Walter Chaw Whatever surface similarities they might share, the difference between something great like John Wick and something like Kingsman: The Secret Service (hereafter Kingsman) is that Kingsman is smug and misanthropic. It's a self-knowing ape of the James Bond franchise, literally name-dropping both it and Jason Bourne with a kind of Cabin in the Woods smirk as it goes through the comic-book, Mark Millar-ugly motions of gadgets, high espionage, and a plot by lisping supervillain Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) that involves the cell-phone triggered, rage-fuelled annihilation of billions. (Yes, it's also a weird rip on third-rate Stephen King novel Cell.) Gone mostly unexamined by critics for fear of "spoiling" the film, I guess, it features a scene in which Barack Obama commits treason and is then rewarded with an explosive decapitation–which is, itself, a form of treason, I think, although I admit the modern political landscape has made the limits of treasonous disrespect of the office somewhat murky to me. It's a jaw-dropping moment in a film that has not only a foreign head of state offer anal sex as a reward to our sprightly young protagonist, but also our Bond-ish hero, Harry (Colin Firth), slaughter a few dozen unlikeable yet innocent civilians in a church. Edgy, non?

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

February 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Ehle
screenplay by Kelly Marcel, based on the novel by E.L. James
directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson

by Walter Chaw In an age of post-satire, where Sarah Palin has a cognitive episode on every channel and prints the take, where it's actually become impossible to mock something that's constantly in the process of taking itself down, enter E. L. James's radioactively-popular "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, which creeps under the low bar set by key inspiration Stephenie Meyer. It all sets the stage of course for Idiocracy's most popular movie in the land being a continuous loop of an ass, sometimes farting. That's what makes the first hour of Sam Taylor-Johnson's film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey actually something like a revelation. She, along with screenwriter Kelly Marcel, has somehow managed to turn the excrescent source material–excrescent not for its eroticism (I like me a good Henry Miller any day of the week), but for its illiteracy–into a satire of that section in the used bookstore where you can buy a grocery-bagful for a $1.00, trade-ins welcome. The picture does the impossible: It makes fun of something so stupid and anti-lovely it was already making fun of itself, and for at least that first hour, I understood completely the camp/communal value of Fifty Shades of Grey. And then there's another hour.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

February 3, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne
written and directed by The Wachowskis

by Walter Chaw “Call me Jupe!” pipes Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) in her breathy, little-girl Lauren Bacall voice, and the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending in the same moment announces itself as the siblings’ latest insufferable piece of shit about being born with a secret and embracing the real you. With mascara. Jupiter Jones is not the oldest of the Three Investigators, but she is the reincarnated Mina Murray, space queen of a clan of Atriedes/Harkonnen industrialists, and she has a special way with honeybees. That’s good, since there’s a scene where she visits a guy (Sean Bean) living in a house infested with honeybees. The guy has a daughter who is sick, which we know because she coughs a little before disappearing into the editing-bay ether with the rest of the connective tissue of a film too terrible to waste a summer slot on. Jupiter Ascending is kind of the Radio Shack of movies in that it’s too expensive to not open, though it desperately needs to close. Just the fact that this reference will be completely obsolete in six months or so says everything that could be said about this trainwreck. And yet I persist.

The Boxtrolls (2014) – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 2, 20152014, 2015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Fantasy

Boxtrolls2

***/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Irena Brignull, Adam Pava, based on the book Here Be Monsters by Alan Snow
directed by Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi

by Walter Chaw Stop-motion animation studio Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman) continues its winning streak with the perverse, lovingly-detailed The Boxtrolls, which nails the company’s developing penchant for inserting a sting of relevance on the trailing end of assorted Nick Park-ian silliness. It’s basically the usual kid-flick moral of not judging lovable books by their horrible, green, warty covers, but there’s also a little bit about the danger of starting wars based on black pretense for unsavoury purposes. Likewise buried in the puns and gross-out gags are a class melodrama, a deep criticism of the ruling class, and a fairly disturbing aside about anti-intellectualism and the misuse of technology. It’s Schindler’s List in the sense that even that film was Spielberg’s own remake of E.T., substituting the industrious, wizened space goblin for Ben Kingsley; The Boxtrolls isn’t as effective a Holocaust/Łódź ghetto allegory as the hotel-clearing in Babe: Pig in the City, but no question the aim of its villains is ultimately genocide.

Lucy (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 21, 20152014, 2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, France, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Lucy1

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he’d had as a child; I’m going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It’s a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman’s mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of “vulgar auteurism,” no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I’ve defended Besson in the past–I’m an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played with in Ted Chiang’s beyond-brilliant 1991 short story “Understand” and grinds it into a grey paste.

FFC’s Best of ’14

January 1, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

by Walter Chaw Two things in 2014. Well, one in 2013 and one in 2014. The first was the Telluride Film Festival, which occurs on Labour Day Weekend and which I attended for the first time in a decade in 2013. The second was a conversation I had with a friend over Skype earlier this year, around the time of my 41^st birthday. They led me, those two things, to change my life from one of quiet desperation to one of perpetual stimulation and challenge. I left a major corporation and a job that provided security and some measure of stability to become general manager of the Alamo Drafthouse in my home state of Colorado. As someone who tends towards depression, it’s hardly hyperbole to say that it was a decision that probably saved my life.

Unbroken (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Coen Brothers, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, War

*/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw I genuinely believe that Angelina Jolie means well. She's like the distaff Sean Penn. Unlike Sean Penn, she probably shouldn't direct more movies. Jolie does her research by going to the places she makes movies about. She cares. She adopts children from those places. She takes embarrassing publicity photos with her subjects, sometimes, that indicate not malicious self-promotion, but rather an unaffected, Costner-esque surprise and wonder. She's growing in her morality before our very eyes, and it's great, but her second time up to the plate, Unbroken, is naive and simpering. The only thing remotely interesting about it is that its subject, Olympic athlete and WWII POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), after getting tortured by the Japanese for a while, decided post-war to embrace Billy Graham and forgive his torturers. That bit, the interesting bit, is left to a few lengthy end-title cards. It's sort of like reading the Old Testament and calling it good and, um, wanting to post the Ten Commandments in schools instead of the Sermon on the Mount. Never mind.

Into the Woods (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Johnny Depp
screenplay by James Lapine, based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw Into the Woods looks exactly like what a legendary Sondheim production would look like were it adapted by that idiot who made Memoirs of a Geisha into a Vegas drag space-opera dragged through a scrim of horrific Occidental Orientalism. (Well, at least to the extent that Memoirs wasn’t that already.) It’s gaudy in every pejorative connotation of the word, packed to the rafters with distracting, stupid, show-offy clutter of the sort that people accumulate when they fear they don’t have substance without it. I rather liked Marshall’s adaptation of Chicago, strangely enough, which speaks more to the un-fuck-up-ability of Kander, Ebb, and Fosse than it does to any latent modesty in director Marshall. Call it beginner’s luck, perhaps, of the kind that has long since dissolved. Marshall has already exceeded all expectations for bloated suck by somehow making the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise more difficult to endure than it had been by the third film. I’d challenge that you could swap Into the Woods out for a print of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and no one would even frickin’ notice. It’s this year’s Les Misérables.

Vengeance is Mine (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20141970s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, The Criterion Collection

Vengeanceismine1

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai
screenplay by Masaru Baba, based on the novel by Ryuzo Saki
directed by Shohei Imamura

by Walter Chaw It would be tempting to say that nature is appalled by all the terrible things Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) does. Just after Enokizu hammers an old man to death in a garden and takes his stuff, Nature erupts in a windstorm–furious witness, it seems: a tempest as analogy for the rough gales driving the mysterious tides of this murderer’s soul. Yet Shohei Imamura has something else entirely on his mind. Vengeance is Mine is about the fallacy of a moral universe. It’s not that it believes there’s no reason for atrocity; rather, it believes there’s no definition for atrocity. Imamura is the spiritual brother of guys like Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick. The questions he asks aren’t about ethics and morality, they’re about all the ways that men lie to themselves about being bound by ethics and morality, only to transgress those boundaries they create, whether they be bans on religion, law, or philosophy. They’re not evil. They can’t help it. No one can.