Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 54 of 149

MHHFF ’13: Haunter

October 14, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/****
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Walter Chaw A Paperhouse/Coraline kind of movie that mixes all that familiar guff into a paste with the can’t-leave-this-house crap from The Others and, oh, why not, Beetlejuice, too, Vincenzo Natali’s follow-up to his unfairly-maligned Splice is the genuinely bad Haunter, which plays every bit like a collection of “Resident Evil” cut-scenes. Abigail Breslin is Lisa, a period-’80s teenager in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt who, in a real knee-slapper, deadpans that “meat is murder” to her mother’s offer of meatloaf, because The Smiths, get it? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Haunter is a master of overstatement (it wouldn’t surprise me if this Lisa is an homage to the Staci Keanan Lisa), even taking a moment at the end to pay tribute to Carpenter’s Christine for really no other reason than that it can’t help being hyperbolic: the screaming is screamier, the whispering is whisperier, and it doesn’t rain, it pours. Lisa is trapped in the last day of her life with her family in a sort of Groundhog Day conceit, except that she’s a ghost who eventually figures out that the same evil ghost dude guy has been killing young girls just like her for decades, and that it’s up to her to break the cycle. This leads, of course, to a scene from the ending of Ghost–no, not that one, the one before it where the villain gets dragged to hell by bad special effects.

MHHFF ’13: FFC Interviews “We Are What We Are” Director Jim Mickle

October 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

The Curtis Hotel is right across the street from the Denver Performing Arts Complex–a city block “hollowed out” in the middle that houses Denver’s premier venues: the ones for the opera, the ballet, the symphony, and touring companies of Broadway productions. On a hot day in September, I walked through the complex, under the four-storey-high glass canopy, to the Curtis. It’s a fun place, this hotel; the floors have themes. I met Jim Mickle on the superhero floor, on the morning his film was to screen at the 4^th Mile High Horror Film Festival. He’s a tall guy, affable, friendly, and not at all what I was expecting after watching his sober, dense, matriarchal horror movie We Are What We Are. I expected, at the least, a tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows. On the last day of publicity for the film, after which he was returning to editing duties on his adaptation of Joe Lansdale’s awesome noir Cold in July, I promised I would try to avoid asking him questions he’d already answered a few dozen times before–although I couldn’t resist bringing up Kelly McGillis and Witness because, yeah, I’m a big, giant dork. We started off, though, talking about Antonia Bird’s Ravenous and his own film’s Ravenous feel.

MHHFF ’13: Big Bad Wolves

October 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Israel, Thriller

***/****
starring Tzahi Grad, Llor Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan, Dov Glickman
written and directed by Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

by Walter Chaw A winning, stylish mixture of black humour, perversion, and character study, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves presents a popular moral quandary in a way that would make Park Chan-wook proud. Indeed, it would fit comfortably in a conversation with that director’s “Vengeance Trilogy” as a companion piece in theme, even execution, to Sympathy for Lady Vengeance that finds a father and a rogue police officer brutally torturing an unassuming schoolteacher because they both suspect he’s responsible for the death of a little girl. With the question of guilt beside the point, the real thrust of the piece is the toll that some actions take on the soul, no matter why they’re undertaken. Crucially, it’s not a product of the United States or South Korea, two cultures married to a specific kind of morally relativistic nightmare that have produced films like this for years, but of an Israeli movie industry that marks this as only their second “horror” release. (The first, incidentally, was a product of this same writing-directing team: 2010’s Kalavet.) For an Israeli thriller to tackle the issue of the zero-sum game of rendition and torture without due process feels dangerous–particularly with the ancillary character of an Arab man on horseback who is wry, handsome, and utterly normal, nay, the only normal one in the entire film.

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

October 9, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Alison Lees-Taylor
written and directed by Randy Moore

by Walter Chaw Randy Moore’s ridiculously-ballsy Escape from Tomorrow proves itself to be a good deal more than a gimmick–said gimmick being that it posits the Magic Kingdom as the locus, the key modern metaphor, for bourgeois discontent, with much of the picture shot surreptitiously on the grounds of Disneyland and Disney World. It’s very much the model of a Luis Buñuel film, not just for its expert surrealism, but also for its sharply-reasoned social satire. It does the impossible in our modern conversation by feeling urgent and fresh, presenting something that’s genuinely shocking to our jaded sensibilities. If there’s anything left that is perverse, one is this violation of such a famously litigious sacred cow. It isn’t even that the idea of using Disney as the eye of a capitalist/vaguely fascistic hurricane is particularly novel: consider that David Mamet took it on in his collection of essays Some Freaks–not to mention the gallons of ink spilled on its essentially corrupt nature by wanks following the long immolation of Disney products Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. No, what’s novel about Escape from Tomorrow is that it does what it does through images; it is essentially this generation’s Superstar, in which Todd Haynes told the life and death of Karen Carpenter using Barbie and Ken dolls. A picture that understands its subject and its relationship to popular culture well enough to make everyone pretty uncomfortable with their own complicity in it all, it’s an indictment of a collective upbringing. The recognition you experience is of your own indoctrinated childhood.

MHHFF ’13: We Are What We Are (2013)

October 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***½/****
starring Bill Sage, Ambyr Childers, Julia Garner, Michael Parks
screenplay by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a leaf falling into a river and a woman, confused and trembling, declaring to a shop owner that she’s fine but that the damp will sometimes get into her head. Jim Mickle’s smart, downcast We Are What We Are looks to Nature as not just insensate, savage, but also the first testament to a greater power. It locates the source of religion in the need to control Nature, more specifically to find meaning in the capricious-seeming meaninglessness of the universe. It implicates the ugliest, most selfish aspect of Nature in the founding of the United States, mining resonance in the idea of “Manifest Destiny”–in the process giving women a starring role: positions of real power in which they’re depended upon for their strength rather than exploited for some idea of their weakness. We Are What We Are enacts a matriarchal melodrama in that way; connecting the feminine aspect to Nature is nothing new, of course, but the picture does so in a way that feels true and is in its own way touching. It opens with a quote that seems Biblical (later, one of the characters will ask another, “Is that from the Bible?”–it’s not then, either), which serves the multifoliate purposes of establishing the mood of the piece, clarifying that religion is born in the breast of man, and establishing a woman as the artifactor of the Word. The woman with the damp in her head, a mother, falls into water and drowns–the first of several images of baptism in the picture, and one that predicts the flood imagery running throughout. Water suggests change, unearths things, washes them clean. It’s all heavy stuff, I know, yet the thrill of We Are What We Are is that it’s about all these things without being obviously about any of it.

MHHFF ’13: Ghost Team One

October 8, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror

*½/****
directed by Ben Peyser & Scott Rutherford

by Walter Chaw Kind of a cross between Paranormal Activity and American Pie, Ben Peyser and Scott Rutherford’s Ghost Team One is buoyed by a game cast and a certain relentlessness but let down by an extended conclusion that finally crosses the line from offensive-but-funny to offensive-offensive. Before that, there’s virgin Sergio (Carlos Santos) and his horny, neo-Stiffler buddy Brad (J.R. Villarreal) outfitting their pad with cameras and enlisting a third, largely-unseen buddy at the handheld in the pursuit of ghost-hunting–or so they tell the beautiful Fernanda (Fernanda Romero). Really, this project seems designed around the chance of maybe capturing some uploadable gonzo porn. This promises oodles of nudity in a supernatural-tinged sex romp, but, alas, what we get are a lot of masturbation jokes and an Asian burlesque from otherwise-hilarious frat-boy Chuck (Tony Cavalero), which starts in a bad place and descends to a very bad place during an extended exorcism scene. Opportunities to attack Mormons are squandered along with the chance to craft something with the sort of ’80s lawlessness of The Last American Virgin. The film can’t even take a successful swipe at The Blair Witch Project, though it tries.

MHHFF ’13: Cheap Thrills

October 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***½/****
starring Pat Healy, Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry, David Koechner
screenplay by Trent Haaga & David Chirchirillo
directed by E.L. Katz

by Walter Chaw A lean, mean, pleasantly unpleasant little clockwork from first-time director E.L. Katz, Cheap Thrills feels and acts like the best kind of noir–the kind where you don’t like anyone very much. Reuniting Pat Healy and Sara Paxton from The Innkeepers (another movie that disproves the maxim that genre film is in trouble), this is a fairly stunning, if a bit on the nose, parable of our recessionary state, as car mechanic/aspiring writer Craig (Healy) is faced with the eviction of his young family from their tiny apartment and a layoff from his already-not-paying-enough job. Drinking his sorrows away at a bar, he runs into an old buddy, Vince (a fantastic Ethan Embry), and an odd couple, Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Paxton), celebrating Violet’s birthday. Mysteriously wealthy, it seems that Colin is looking to solve the puzzle of what to get the impossibly pretty younger wife who has everything, and the answer is to stage a series of increasingly sadistic stunts between Craig and Vince for various bounties. $200 for saying something to the meth-addict at the bar to make her slap you; $500 if you hit the strip-club bouncer first. The stakes escalate, tensions rise, and it all ends with probably the single best expression of the current state of manhood in the lower-middle-class United States circa 2013.

Mile High Horror Film Festival ’13: An Introduction

October 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw I’d been vaguely aware of the Mile High Horror Film Festival its previous three years to the extent that I’d reached out at some point to see about coverage, but it came to nothing and was easy for me to ignore. Then a good friend moved from the Denver Film Society to the newly-opened Denver location of Alamo Drafthouse as creative director, and one September morning, I found myself driving down to meet with him and chat about his new position. This Drafthouse is beautiful, by the way, and for cinephiles in the Denver area, it’s a hope devoutly wished, answered. If you don’t support this venue and its mission statement (“to save cinema,” its co-owner, Tom, declared to me proudly), you don’t deserve it. Anyway, in the cavernous, leather-lined lobby, I met my friend, who had just come from a planning meeting with festival founder Tim Schultz. Handshakes facilitated, I got in touch with ace PR guy Travis Volz a few days later, and suddenly found myself sitting in a little booth across from Jim Mickle, director of a very, very good remake/not-really-a-remake of We Are What We Are.

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer’s later films–not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it’s terrible, but that it’s all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

The Collection (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 30, 20132012, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Lee Tergesen, Christopher McDonald
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by Marcus Dunstan

by Walter Chaw A cheap, loose remake of Aliens that substitutes rampaging hordes of xenomorphs with a gimp-masked kung-fu master, Marcus Dunstan’s stupid sequel to his stupid The Collector at least, this time around, doesn’t function as a lame, who-cares-if-it’s-intentional echo of Home Alone. No, this one vaguely recalls turn-of-the-century serial ghoul (and hotel owner) H.H. Holmes, who built a giant hotel for the express purpose of culling his guests for, among other things, medical skeletons and simple shits and giggles. Oh, who’m I kidding–the only thing The Collection reminds me of is that I have other things I should probably be doing…oh, and that Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship opens with a bunch of people getting bisected by a runaway cable. The Collection, incidentally, opens with everyone getting chewed up by a combine attached to a runaway cable at a nightclub. This leaves Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick, of interest for the short For Your Consideration, in which she absolutely nails Anne Hathaway’s Les Misérables performance) to be packed into a steamer trunk, because for all the things our bogey The Collector (Randall Archer) is, he’s also a Jazz-era ocean-liner passenger. The Collector promptly spirits her away to his horror hotel, the one he’s set up with boobytraps and galleries of pickled people parts (and tarantulas, of course, in case he needs to set them free to gross out girls and stuff), making it a terrible place to stay but still better than most Motel 6s. BAM! Take that, Motel 6.

Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013) + The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

September 26, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Theatrical

MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
**½/****
directed by Jim Bruce

THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI
***/****
directed by Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw It’s difficult to review Jim Bruce’s incendiary, scholarly Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (hereafter Money), because even as I was understanding the role of the Federal Reserve Bank for the first time in my adult life (how its adjustments of interest actually drive the economy of not merely this nation, but every industrialized nation in our rapidly-shrinking world), I found myself comparing the film to one of those informational videos that play on endless loops in Natural History museums. It’s immensely educational…and dry as a soda cracker. What I find to be problematic about it is the same thing I found problematic about Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth: it’s not really art, is it? Not to open that can of worms, but for me, as a personal demarcation, art inspires something like Kierkegaardian fear and loathing–existential trembling, yes: a mirror held to nature in all the myriad, alien, surprising, often terrifying forms that nature assumes. What Money does, and does admirably, is explain what the hell happened to the United States’ financial institutions right around 1998 or so and continuing on into now–explain what the bailout was and how/why it affects the average American. Most fascinatingly, it explains how far in estimation the once god-like Alan Greenspan has fallen in the eyes of those who worshipped him. But while these are noble achievements, they’re not enough.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

September 25, 2013****/****, 1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero’s conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity–its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) and its key ritual dedicated to a celebration of the eating of the saviour’s flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod–an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness–in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

September 23, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Fantasy

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There’s an interesting moment early on in Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer, but don’t get used to it. It’s a cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle (absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they’re both products of neglect and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife and turmoil (in the way that wasn’t properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead of night. It’s the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided between the ones who didn’t like Singer’s Superman Returns and the ones who are right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, and Ian McShane said “yes” to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci, McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la 1980s Michael Caine.

World War Z (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

September 22, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, DVD, Horror, Zombie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Telluride ’13 Wrap-Up

September 15, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

by Walter Chaw The drive home always feels faster. I didn’t think it would this time, but it did.

Telluride ’13: FFC Interviews “Under the Skin” Director Jonathan Glazer

September 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Telluride, Telluride 2013

On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride’s free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola’s gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that–she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I’d last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can’t imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.

Telluride ’13: “On Death Row” – Conversation with James Barnes + Portrait of Robert Fratta

September 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Television, Telluride, Telluride 2013

"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes ***/**** directed by Werner Herzog "On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta **/**** directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Two shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G. Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats…

Telluride ’13: The Invisible Woman

September 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013, UK

***/**** directed by Ralph Fiennes by Walter Chaw It opens with an almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity…

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

Telluride ’13: Nebraska

September 6, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Road Movie, Telluride, Telluride 2013

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.