Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 49 of 149

Interstellar (2014)

November 4, 20142014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, we thought she would miscarry. We’d been through several miscarriages already; the doctors weren’t optimistic. I don’t know why we agreed to risk it again, the crippling grief and unrecoverable loss. We told ourselves that if we couldn’t carry this last child to term, we’d console ourselves with a long vacation, the two of us. The appointment with the doctor the day we were to learn the timing of our misfortune, he found a heartbeat, and we held our breath for the next seven months, through a difficult pregnancy and birth, until she was here. My daughter turned 11 last week, and she’s perfect. Her brother is eight, and he’s perfect, too. I spent the first several months with my daughter as her primary caregiver; I was teaching and writing and my wife was making our living, and I have a relationship with my daughter unusual for it, I think. I look back and it’s not her birth that was miraculous–as miracles go, that one happens a few hundred thousand times a day. No, the miracle is what I suddenly understood about the world now that I was the happy accessory to someone else’s happiness and security.

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

November 2, 20142014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Romance

Maleficent1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley
screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Robert Stromberg

by Walter Chaw A gyno-centric reimagining of Disney’s own Sleeping Beauty, visual-effects guy Robert Stromberg’s directorial debut Maleficent (from a script by never-good Disney house-overwriter Linda Woolverton) takes all the ingredients for a horrible disaster and somehow wrestles a fitfully fascinating film from them. It hates men, that much is certain. Paints them as alternately servile and monstrous. Good men follow orders and are easily intimidated; bad men are sexually dangerous and violent. Good men know their place, led about on a tether and bullied into situations by women in groups or singly; and the rest, well…sufficed to say that Sharlto Copley, the most Ellis-from-Die-Hard human, is cast as chief BigBad, the good king Stefan. The film even goes so far as to suggest that romantic, heterosexual love is a sham, a dangerous one at that–something it tries to soften with a couple of doe-eyed exchanges during the epilogue, though I’m not buying it. In fact, had Maleficent truly committed to its themes of feminine empowerment and rage, had it linked them together hand-in-hand without entire agonizing stretches of Disney-fication, it could have entered into the same conversation as Tarantino’s Kill Bills. Here’s another film with a kick-ass female protagonist who finds strength in motherhood. Alas, for as often as it’s great, it’s limited by what its masters will allow.

Force Majeure (2014)

October 30, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Sweden, Theatrical

Turist
****/****
starring Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Clara Wttergren, Vincent Wettergren
written and directed by Ruben Östlund

by Walter Chaw As so few people saw the magnificent The Loneliest Planet (including a few who actually reviewed it), it's hardly a spoiler to say that Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure is essentially the droller, married version of Julia Loktev's masterpiece of relational/gender dynamics. Set at an exclusive ski resort in the French Alps, the picture follows handsome workaholic Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and his beautiful wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), as they spend a week with their two adorable children in what should be a winter paradise. On the first day, something terrible happens and, more to the point, Tomas doesn't act or react in the way one would expect of a husband and father, leading to a series of increasingly awkward conversations between not only the couple, but also their friends Matts (Kristofer Hivju) and Matts's much-younger girlfriend, Fanny (Fanni Metelius). The brilliance of Force Majeure is how carefully it builds itself to the "big event" and then, after, how perfectly Östlund captures the way people talk to one another, whether married with children or just starting off. It's a withering essay on masculine roles and ego–one, too, on the parts women play in easing or exacerbating those expectations. It's amazing.

Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

October 23, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

Eliza Graves
*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Jim Sturgess, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Caine
screenplay by Joe Gangemi, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Brad Anderson has made a few interesting movies that seem to be more interesting to other people. I like Session 9 well enough, The Machinist is fine, Transsiberian's fine; they're all fine. His latest, Stonehearst Asylum, based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that's been adapted a couple of times already, is fine, too, I guess. It's the literalization of inmates running the asylum, following young Dr. Newgate (Jim Sturgess) as he travels to the titular nuthatch to begin his tutelage under good Dr. Lamb (Sir Ben Kingsley), who has some pretty unconventional ideas about how the best way to treat psychotics and the like is to not treat them at all. Also, there's a beautiful noblewoman with people-touching-her issues named Eliza (Kate Beckinsale), after whom the European version of this film is still named, which says something about what distributors think audiences will tolerate in our respective markets, methinks.

Insomnia (1997) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 21, 20141990s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Mystery, Norway, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Insomnia2

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Bjørn Floberg, Gisken Armand
screenplay by Nicolaj Frobenius & Erik Skjoldbjærg
directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg

by Walter Chaw A rather astonishing feature debut, Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia is dour, surreal, nihilistic, and steadfast in its theme of masculine self-reflection. It’s as slippery to pin down and single-mindedly purposeful as its protagonist–a procedural only inasmuch as Oedipus Rex is a procedural. It’s a work of Expressionism, in other words: its exteriors are projections of its interiors in all their canted, perverse, blighted ugliness. An essential misnomer to call it a “noir,” Insomnia in its best moments is an absurdist nightmare that pinions male behaviour as these constant vacillations between violence and frailty. (This choice to discuss the world in terms of gender relationships is likely why it’s considered a noir at all.) It’s the movie that brought Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård to international prominence via a role that suggested a departure, hot on the heels of Breaking the Waves, though a quick peek at his earliest work (especially Zero Kelvin) hints at the volatility of Insomnia‘s Det. Engstrom. He’s the centre of a dark universe. Setting the film in a place above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn’t set has the interesting effect of lighting Engstrom, as he commits his many black deeds, like a particularly ill patient in a doctor’s examining room.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Whispers Behind the Wall + The Duke of Burgundy

October 19, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

Die Frau hinter der Wand
**½/****
directed by Grzegorz Muskala

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
***/****
written and directed by Peter Strickland

by Walter Chaw Grzegorz Muskala's moody, sexy Whispers Behind the Wall updates Matthew Chapman's little-seen but well-remembered Heart of Midnight. Both films are about a young, vulnerable, single person in a new space, discovering Monsters of the Id hiding behind the walls. Where Chapman's film tossed literal apples at a quailing Jennifer Jason Leigh, Muskala introduces vaginal holes in his hero Martin's (Vincent Redetzki) new flat, the better to hide illicit diaries and, ultimately, ease egress into the climax. More, Muskala fills Martin's never-draining bathtub with red sludge, and hides in its drain, in one of several nods to Hitchcock, the key to the whole bloody affair. It seems that Martin, a student who looks just like Ewan McGregor in Shallow Grave, has secured his new, coveted lodgings on the strength of his willingness to allow a creepy caretaker to take a shirtless picture for hot landlady Simone (Katharina Heyer). It also seems former occupant Roger has disappeared, leaving Martin to eavesdrop on Simone banging her insane boyfriend Sebastian (Florian Panzer) before finding himself in Simone's eye, in her clutches, and in her bed.

The Guest (2014)

October 16, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe, Leland Orser, Lance Reddick
screenplay by Simon Barrett
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw With The Guest, Adam Wingard continues his examination of '80s exploitation genre flicks–'90s, too: the film is among other things a canny update of James Foley's Fear, which was home to not only Mark Wahlberg's best performance but arguably Carter Burwell's finest hour as well. Like Wingard's You're Next, The Guest acts like what it mimics and, like any good predator, breaks from camouflage at the most unexpected moments. It's funny throughout for the fan familiar with this sort of thing, but it's really funny in its final shot, when it reveals an understanding that people love movies like this because of their absurdity and not in spite of it. Best is how in its focused nastiness, it highlights exactly how grim-verging-on-nihilistic '80s teensploitation often was, how low it was willing to go, how ugly it was willing to get. Yeah, I loved it.

Fury (2014)

October 16, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, War

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Signifying not much, David Ayer's Fury is another of his brutal excoriations/celebrations of men under pressure that people like Howard Hawks did really well because people like Howard Hawks are geniuses. It follows Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), a tank commander in the 2^nd Armored Division doing mop-up duty in the heart of Nazi Germany during the first months of 1945. His motley crew of battle-hardened, psychopathic misfits is composed of backwoods inbred "Coon-Ass" (Jon Bernthal); the quietly religious one who's going to go insane, Bible (Shia LaBeouf); Mexican guy Gordo (Michael Pena); and clean-cut-rookie-whom-Wardaddy-will-take-under-his-wing-and-see-himself-in-while-they-both-learn-something-from-each-other-they-didn't-think-they-could Norman (Logan Lerman). Episodic in the way of such things, it's a story of men and war told through a series of tank battles, intra-tank squabbling, and dramatic scenes like the one where Wardaddy makes Norman kill someone in cold blood, and that other one where Wardaddy makes Norman sleep with a beautiful young fräulein they discover hiding in the rubble (Alicia von Rittberg). Woe be to any woman in an Ayers joint, however. Spoiler.

Fantastic Fest ’14: In Order of Disappearance

October 14, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Norway, Revenge, Thriller

Kraftidioten
***/****
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Pål Sverre Hagen, Bruno Ganz, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw I’ve been a fan of Hans Petter Moland since his ferocious Zero Kelvin, starring a relatively unknown Stellan Skarsgård as a psychotic trapper alone with two other men in the wintry Norwegian wilderness. A wildly successful commercial director, Moland’s work is more contemplative than you might expect, considering. He was hand-picked by Terrence Malick, to give you an idea of his style, to take over The Beautiful Country for him when the director was called to another project (The New World). Moland returns to the frigid Norwegian winter with In Order of Disappearance, which opens with a man shaving, cutting a square swath through the foam on his face. Cut to the man on a giant snowplow, describing the same shape through a blanket of white. It’s a beautiful moment. Moland’s films are full of them.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Automata

October 12, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller

Autómata
*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, Birgitte Sorensen
screenplay by Gabe Ibáñez, Igora, Javier Sánchez Donate
directed by Gabe Ibáñez

by Walter Chaw Though I've seen worse movies than Gabe Ibáñez's Automata, I've also seen Automata what feels like a few dozen times. Rather than turn this into an exercise in listing source materials, however attractive shooting fish in barrels might be, best to focus on how the picture makes Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics into two (making it different!), and how its closest film analogue is probably somewhere in the junction between Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Richard Stanley's Hardware. That'll have some of you feeling pretty excited and most of you either puzzled or properly dissuaded. Yes, Automata is a muddy piece of pseudo-profundity showcasing its creators' lack of vision, discretion, and judgment. It needed at least a few more passes through the typewriter, frankly, and a mid-film appearance by a distractingly-altered Melanie Griffith–altered by real-life plastic surgery, not in-film techno-debauchery–highlights exactly how brutal the Hollywood machinery is in destroying people like her and Kim Novak and Lara Flynn Boyle and on and on. Griffith's kind of like the girl-version of Mickey Rourke at this point. There's more sadness and auto-reflection embedded in how she looks now than in anything in the film.

Fantastic Fest 14: The World of Kanako

October 9, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Japan, Mystery

***½/****
starring Koji Yakusho, Nana Komatsu, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Jo Odagiri
screenplay by Tetsuya Nakashima, Miako Tadano, Nobuhiro Monma, based on the novel by Akio Fukamachi
directed by Tetsuya Nakashima

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike's Natural Born Killers, essentially, with a bit of the old Park Chan-wook ultra-violence (or is it Shohei Imamura's A Clockwork Orange? Tarantino's Hardcore?); I'm finding it next to impossible to talk about Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako free of larger contexts, and its short-circuiting of my hard drive is perhaps intentional. The film is extremely stylish, distractingly so–or it would be if not for a central, anchoring performance from Koji Yakusho as disgraced detective Akikazu Fujishima, demolished by a long drunk and roused back to furious, ugly action by the disappearance of his daughter, Kanako (Nana Komatsu). Yakusho is so good, so grounded in his self- destruction and loathing, so extraordinary, really, from calamity to atrocity to spurious bloodletting, that watching him in this Grand Guignol is something like a true privilege. He's manifested possibly the most disgusting hero in the history of such things (Mickey Rourke's Harry Angel? Eagle scout), a creature of this dank, abattoir noir who gets progressively filthier, baser, as the picture unravels. His performance, not to gild the lily, is fucking genius.

Fantastic Fest ’14: From the Dark

October 8, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland

***/****
starring Niamh Algar, Stephen Cromwell, Gerry O'Brien, Ged Murray
written and directed by Conor McMahon

by Walter Chaw Conor McMahan's From the Dark is a hell of a film. Sarah (Niamh Algar) and Mark (Stephen Cromwell) are taking a little detour into the moors when they're predictably bogged down as night approaches. What they don't know is that a peat farmer has just been summarily attacked in a stagnant pool after unearthing what appears to be some sort of bog mummy earlier in the day. It's a nifty set-up for a spam-in-a-cabin scenario, and indeed, Mark discovers a ramshackle farmhouse where he and Sarah decide to spend the night–especially once they're attacked by some unseen thing apparently repulsed by light of any kind. It's an amalgam, in other words, of The Descent and Nosferatu: a horror film resting on those genre pillars of transgression, transformation, and contagion that cannily milks every possible light source in its rural environment (cell phones, an old tube television…more would be telling) for surprise and plot points.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Over Your Dead Body

October 5, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan

**½/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Ko Shibasaki, Hideaki Ito, Miho Nakanishi
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike’s dip into formalism and tradition continues with Over Your Dead Body, a play-within-a-play conceit whereby star stage performer Miyuki (Ko Shibasaki) reprises the legendary role of Oiwa in the classic “Yotsuya Kaidan” and finds his off-stage relationship with co-star Kousuke (Ebizo Ichikawa) beginning to resemble the supernatural relational drama in which they’ve been cast. It’s essentially the good version of Birdman, however low a bar that might be, with Miike embracing the new, languid pace of his middle-to-later career before suggesting that maybe he’s ready to let a little of the ol’ Gozu out again. Another Audition tale of a woman wronged, Over Your Dead Body can be read by the Miike scholar as further examination of the filmmaker’s sources and inspirations while providing for the neophyte enough craft and late-in-the-game Guignol to sate most any variety of bloodlust. Yeah, it gets pretty nasty.

Gone Girl (2014)

October 2, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
screenplay by Gillian Flynn, based on her novel
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw The only question David Fincher’s movies try to answer is whether it’s possible to do everything well (better than well, really–I mean better than anyone has ever done anything before) and still produce what is essentially a piece of shit. He’s the king of garbage cinema, David Lean doing Jackie Collins for some damn reason. Sometimes, he does misanthropic stuff that’s transcendent (Se7en, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and sometimes he does misanthropic stuff like Gone Girl. Don’t get me wrong: for what it is, Gone Girl is a masterpiece, but its source, Gillian Flynn’s ridiculously popular potboiler, is so trashy that at some point one can’t help but wonder if Fincher isn’t testing himself with the weakest possible material. After tackling this and Stieg Larsson, I suspect he was in the running for, and disappointed not to get his hands on, Fifty Shades of Grey; how about this one with Fabio on the cover, Mr. Fincher? There seems no low to which Fincher wouldn’t descend, and here goes your deeply, comically misanthropic proof.

Fantastic Fest ’14: ABCs of Death 2

October 1, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw There’s a song by The Nails called “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Here are 52 lines about 26 films. Let’s go:

Amateur (***/***, d. Evan Katz)
A hitman’s plans for carrying out his contract are slick and sexy, while the reality is clumsy and ridiculous. Katz follows up Cheap Thrills with a short that shows the same comfort with gore, physical comedy, and Naked Gun causality.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Dwarves Kingdom

October 1, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals

***/****
directed by Matthew Salton

by Walter Chaw Here’s the thing, and I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful. At least culturally, it should be said, there’s an extreme disconnect in terms of social mores. There’s a certain directness that’s difficult to assimilate as an American, along with a certain disapproval that maybe I’m just more sensitive to because of my privileged status as neither fish nor fowl. I used to say the Chinese perfected racism because they had to learn how to be racist towards people who didn’t look substantially different from themselves. I became a case study in a graduate anthropology course once concerning the evolution of human sexuality. Asked about my object-choice apparatus (was I triggered more by distinct facial features than by hair colour, for instance, or body type?), I wasn’t offended. It’s a good question.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Spring

September 29, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi

***½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Vanessa Bednar, Shane Brady
screenplay by Justin Benson
directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

by Walter Chaw Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring is sensitive, smart, romantic, and disturbing in the best ways. Flip to call it Cronenberg’s Before Midnight, but how else to describe a warm, resonant relationship drama-cum-travelogue that happens to feature tentacles and extreme body mutations? It’s a compliment. Evan (a tremendous Lou Taylor Pucci) loses his mother to a wasting illness in the same week he loses his job, so he packs it up and goes to Italy, where he encounters a beautiful, mysterious woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker) who happens to have an accent he can’t place. No one could.

Fantastic Fest ’14: The Incident

September 28, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sci-Fi

El Incidente
½*/****
written and directed by Isaac Ezban

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ideas hidden in Isaac Ezban’s The Incident, packed in there amongst an impenetrable payload of dreck. It shows some promise only when it suggests William Sleator’s House of Stairs, the book it most resembles when it works. Unfortunately, the book it wants to resemble is Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, which, you know, it just doesn’t. It’s the tale of two time loops following a mysterious celestial explosion: the first strands a pair of petty robbers and their cop pursuer in an Escher painting, while the second strands a squabbling, awful family on an endless highway TO NOWHERE. Portents and signs everywhere hang low like significantly meaningful storm clouds, leading to a thirty-minute exposition–in what feels like the fourth or fifth hour of a hundred-minute film–that’s delivered with the careful precision of a slow adult explaining something s/he doesn’t entirely understand to a slow child. Painful? It’s at least painful. Ironic, too, that this movie about temporal looping makes you a victim of it.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Everly

September 27, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Revenge, Thriller

½*/****
starring Salma Hayek, Jennifer Blanc, Togo Igawa, Gabriella Wright
screenplay by Yale Hannon
directed by Joe Lynch

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a brutal, just-offscreen gang-rape perpetrated on hooker Everly (Salma Hayek) by a gaggle of Yakuza scumbags. Escaping into the bathroom, Everly retrieves a pistola, secreted away The Godfather-like, tries to call her mother and the daughter she’s never known on her cell, and then goes all spree-killer on her tormentors. But Everly is neither a rape-revenge flick nor a declaration of feminism, really, what with its constantly declaring every single woman character a “whore” in its first half-hour. No, what Joe Lynch’s reductive, big-dumb flick is, is a sub-Robert Rodriguez ripper, marking it as sub-sub-Tarantino. To be fair, it also rips off, shot for shot, moments from Sam Raimi; from Reservoir Dogs in a poor, bleeding-out schlub dubbed “Dead Man” (Akie Kotabe), who fans of “The Simpsons” will recognize as Frank Grimes; and from Luc Besson, in particular (and if you’re a carbon copy of Besson, the image fidelity is a field of giant pixels at this point). There’s so little imagination in the imitation, in fact, that the director himself has described his picture as “Die Hard with boobs.” Classy.

Fantastic Fest ’14: John Wick

September 25, 20142014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Revenge, Thriller

***½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw Essentially a remake of Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life shot through with oodles of late-’80s John Woo gunplay, stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick is, damnit, really just so much fun. Existing in a fascinating universe that marks it as one of the better comic-book adaptations without origins in an actual comic book, it features Keanu Reeves as the titular angry guy, taking on the Russian mob because they killed his dog. That’s it. The way John Wick gets from point A to point B, though, with a reliance on what appear to be practical effects and a strong, smart use of Reeves’s sinewy grace and muscularity, is a thing of action-movie beauty. Ultimately, it’s a showcase for elaborate stunt-work and fight choreography, and, because I’m starting to think of Stahelski’s film like the films directed by Yuen Wo Ping, that’s totally all right.