Hugh Grant in Heretic

Heretic (2024)

November 18, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Heretic‘s premise is childish wish-fulfillment, an exercise in mental cruelty in which a medium-schooled skeptic challenges a pair of comely young missionaries, hoisting them on their own insinuating, syllogistic petard. And who better to function as audience avatar than Hugh Grant? Rather, this elderly iteration of Grant, crusted over with a shell of sociopathic nastiness, like his brittle accent made manifest in flesh and wool cardigan? Get ’em, you ossified piece of British shit! Grant plays Mr. Reed, a cozy hermit secreted smugly in his richly-appointed hobbit hole who invites Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) in from a God-is-wroth thunderstorm to indulge their desire to share with him the Good News courtesy of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He has a fire roaring, a blueberry pie in the oven, and, allegedly, a shy wife cowering in a back bedroom, so the girls aren’t in a strange man’s home alone with the strange man. The Mission wouldn’t allow that, you see, but Mr. Reed is reassuring. The amiable chatting soon turns to wicked jousting, and the jousting becomes inappropriate and uncomfortable. When Barnes and Paxton try to leave, they find that the front door is locked and their only option is the Stockton prize of lady or tiger. That is, they are offered the choice of two doors–one marked “BELIEVE,” the other “DISBELIEVE”–as their only possibility of escape from his unctuous, patronizing company. Behind one is the back entrance to the house. Behind the other? Tiger or, rather, Tyger, of the “here there be” variety.

Red One

Red One (2024)

November 14, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw I’ve been waiting decades for a spiritual successor to Jingle All the Way, that repugnant ode to materialism gussied up in Yuletide cheer like a corpulent whore from a Victorian stroke-book. Remember that moment in The Rundown where Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief cameo to “hand off” his action-king crown to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Turns out it was a monkey’s paw predicting the foolhardiness of them pursuing cush gigs in comic-book franchises and immortality in beloved perennial family holiday classics. How many fingers do monkeys have, anyway? Jake Kasdan’s Red One casts The Rock as humourless man of action Callum Drift. Not humourless like fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista’s brilliant turn as neurodivergent Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, humourless like a guy doing a tough-guy bit… and also a dull-guy bit, and, uh, dense, you know–disillusioned, too, because grown-ups don’t love Christmas anymore. Callum, you see, is head bodyguard to Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for I don’t fucking know, go watch it yourself. Elite L-something and Fortification or someshit; honestly, we’re both diminished just acknowledging it. Wait, “Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification.” Fuck. This is humiliating.

Smile 2

Smile (2022) + Smile 2 (2024)

October 22, 2024Posted in2022, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

SMILE
***/****
starring Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert
written and directed by Parker Finn

SMILE 2
***½/****
starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Kyle Gallner
written and directed by Parker Finn

by Walter Chaw I was distracted by what I saw as the narrative looseness of Parker Finn’s Smile, based on his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept. I thought it made a bit of a splash for a high concept carried obsessively–the titular smile maybe really just the Kubrick stare: lowered brow, manic grin. Although I admired the craft of it and Sosie Bacon’s star turn as a traumatized shrink with a troubled past seemingly losing her mind in the wake of a patient’s suicide, I dismissed the picture as thin and forgettable. But it nags and tugs, enough so that I started to wonder if I’d judged it too quickly and too harshly. I revisited Smile after watching its sequel; I realized I’d misplaced a few of the story details and flat-out forgotten the rest, and I wanted to give both films a fair accounting. Smile is two things: it’s a short film’s high concept expanded to feature length that may have one too many subplots; and it’s a solemn, principled piece on suicidal ideation and the theory it can be passed on–triggered, if you will–like other mental health crises such as eating disorders. Could someone in recovery from a self-annihilating disorder be pulled back into active crisis through exposure to someone else in the throes of the beast?

Strong and Sebastian in The Apprentice

The Apprentice (2024)

October 11, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blog, Canada, Denmark, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical

***/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
written by Gabriel Sherman
directed by Ali Abbasi

by Bill Chambers “The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself,” the Trump Organization’s former director of social media Justin McConney told ESQUIRE in 2018, “was comparable to the moment in Jurassic Park when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors[.] I was like, ‘Oh no.'” Though it takes place before the dawn of social media as we know it, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, whose title shrewdly weaponizes Trump’s pop-culture legacy against him, is essentially about a velociraptor learning to open doors. Indeed, the weight Sebastian Stan gained to play Trump– something of an anachronism for the time period being covered (like his blonde cockscomb), perhaps to narrow the gap between Stan’s handsomeness and our calcified image of Trump as an orange tub of Vaseline in Barry Egan’s hand-me-downs–contorts his lips into a reptilian grimace that’s not inappropriate, even as it departs from the glory-hole mouth that stiffens into a rictus around other terrible people. Stan’s performance is more expressionism than impression, but I think that’s the right approach: Dead-on impersonations of Trump are a dime a dozen, and they long ago stopped revealing anything about him. They’re fun–and “fun” is how you declaw a raptor for the masses.

Apartment 7a

Apartment 7A (2024) + The First Omen (2024)

October 5, 2024Posted in2024, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Italy, Serbia, Streaming, Thriller, UK

APARTMENT 7A
***/****
starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Kevin McNally, Jim Sturgess
screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James
directed by Natalie Erika James

THE FIRST OMEN
***½/****
starring Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas
directed by Arkasha Stevenson

by Walter Chaw The sense of dread in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Richard Donner’s The Omen originates from the sacrifice of anonymous young women, dead before the stories proper begin. They are the black grasping soil, the damned ritual cycle from which feelings of claustrophobia and destiny extend backwards into an infinite past and forwards into an inevitable future. These dead girls give the stories a sense of eternity, in other words, and the feeling of inescapability. I love that the latest entries in these peculiar franchises are by women. About a third of the way through Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, two concentric circles of novitiates sing and dance around troubled young Carlita (Nicole Sorace) like pagans around a maypole while above them a nun, Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson), sets herself on fire after promising her immolation is “all for you!” For whom, it’s not clear. Possibly Carlita, the red herring of the film’s first half and the obvious source of demonic visitation at the Italian convent in which the film is set, where inexperienced Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) is assigned, fresh from America like Suspiria‘s Suzy Bannion. Or maybe Sister Anjelica’s messy end is meant for Sister Margaret as a strange welcome or a dire warning. “Ring Around the Rosie” was created to teach us about the symptoms of the Black Death. I don’t know what sort of death the circling children are teaching in The First Omen, though it doesn’t matter nearly so much as Stevenson’s absolute command of the unsettling, uncanny image and the ineffable gravity of archetype.

Gemini Ma'am

My Old Ass (2024) + Omni Loop (2024)

September 26, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel

MY OLD ASS
**½/****
starring Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler
written and directed by Megan Park

OMNI LOOP
**½/****
starring Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edibiri, Carlos Jacott, Harris Yulin
screenplay by Bernardo Britto
directed by Bernardo Britto

by Walter Chaw Writing in the time of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who both had takes on his “once was horny, now reformed” shtick, Robert Herrick was an Anglican cleric who came upon his piety late in life, as many of us do. Herrick’s most famous work is a “to his coy mistress” bit about “gather[ing] ye rosebuds while ya may,” which, while not as vivid as Marvell’s version threatening a woman that worms will take the frigid object of his pursuit’s virginity if she doesn’t lose it before she dies, is nevertheless a come-on passing as wisdom. As advice to a younger self goes, though, getting laid as much as possible seems the standard, along with more flossing. (It says something that Billy Joel offers the same carrot to his Catholic inamorata in “Only the Good Die Young.”) As we collectively advance into the winter of our sour regret over the calamities we didn’t avoid that have led us to a dark and dimming future, find two films about going back in time to warn, provide guidance for, and essentially function as a mentor to our younger selves before it’s too late. I think it’s touching that we’re having this idea at the same time–strangers, I mean, scenting great change carried on the same foul wind and offering up signal fires from their respective, isolated bunkers. It’s like the last exhalation of a drowning man: it won’t make a shred of difference, but it does trouble the water for a second. Besides, at this point, “touching” is all we got left.

Young Werther/Friendship

TIFF ’24: Young Werther + Friendship

September 18, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

YOUNG WERTHER
*/****
starring Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Iris Apatow, Patrick J. Adams
screenplay by José Lourenço, based on the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
directed by José Lourenço

FRIENDSHIP
**½/****
starring Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer
written and directed by Andrew DeYoung

by Bill Chambers Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s 1774 semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made Goethe a global literary sensation practically overnight. José Lourenço’s Young Werther dares to poke a hole in the fourth wall by splashing this factoid across the screen in introductory text, comparing the book’s impact to that of Beatlemania. It’s certainly a choice, explaining the success of The Sorrows of Young Werther as if today’s audiences have no sense of history while simultaneously drawing an analogy to a fad from the ’60s. A more current reference would, I suppose, throw off the film’s Luddite chic. This is a modern-dress adaptation, yes, but there’s a strong whiff of Wes Anderson in how it translates the novel’s epistolary form into a fondness for the quaint and the bespoke (those opening titles are presented with filigreed borders, silent-movie style)–not to mention the picture’s formalist approach to shot design, which at least gives Young Werther more visual élan than one expects of a Crave Original. Citing the book’s fame at all, though: what’s the point? It feels like insecurity at best, overpromising at worst. Can you tell I didn’t care for Young Werther? It’s just so in love with itself that I felt like a third wheel.

The Shrouds

TIFF ’24: The Shrouds

September 15, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sci-Fi, Thriller, TIFF

***½/****
starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda David Cronenberg is no stranger to illness and death, from the synchronized degeneration of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers to the sickly corporeal canvas of performance artist Saul in Crimes of the Future. But the aftermath of death has never felt more personal than in The Shrouds, where the filmmaker plants his most explicit authorial doppelgänger in Vincent Cassell’s Karsh, a cryptically described “producer of industrial videos” who shares Cronenberg’s career interest in the body, his trim white hair, his puckish sense of humour, and his grief, which is so palpable it’s rotting his teeth. Made in the aftermath of his wife’s long-term illness and 2017 death, The Shrouds isn’t Cronenberg’s elegy for the dead so much as an exquisitely sad and bitterly funny reflection on the desperate, illogical, unfulfilled ways the people they leave behind–in this case, a filmmaker with a fixation on his deceased wife’s body–mourn them.

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

September 11, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

ABERDEEN
**/****
starring Gail Maurice, Billy Merasty, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, Jennifer Podemski
written and directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas

SEEDS
***/****
starring Kaniehtiio Horn, Patrick Garrow, Dylan Cook, Graham Greene
written and directed by Kaniehtiio Horn

by Bill Chambers It opens on a manipulative but striking juxtaposition. A First Nations girl, Aberdeen (Ashlyn Cote-Squire), and her little brother Boyd (Lucas Schacht) go fishing with their grandparents at a lake–a sun-dappled tableau that fades out on young Aberdeen’s bright smile and fades back in to find middle-aged Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) passed out on a bench, being kicked awake by the turtleneck Gestapo on park patrol. Across town, Boyd (Ryan R. Black) is at the doctor, receiving the devastating news that he’s terminally ill. As he’s taking this in, his phone rings: could he come get his big sis out of jail? There’s an implied “this time” when the police inform Boyd that Aberdeen’s lucky they’re not pressing criminal charges, but Boyd, espying a Bible on the officer’s desk, appeals to the man’s religious convictions (and gambles on his latent racism) in blaming her actions on a “beer demon,” saying he’s been trying to get her to church. The Indigenous people we meet in Aberdeen have to be nimble code-switchers to navigate the world, and that’s something our proud, mercurial heroine steadfastly isn’t. She’s all out of fucks to give–that is, until Boyd informs her of his cancer, which has forced him to place her grandchildren, who became Aberdeen’s responsibility after her drug-addicted daughter ran away (and then Boyd’s when flooding left Aberdeen unhoused), in foster care. With a white family, no less, something “Abby” resents more than Boyd, who was raised in a white home, apart from his sister. For Aberdeen, it feels like nothing is ours and everything is theirs. What follows is a Dardennes-ian narrative in which an anxious Abby attempts to clean up her act faster than the ticker of red tape will allow.

Paying for It

TIFF ’24: Paying for It

September 6, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
starring Dan Beirne, Emily Lê, Andrea Werhun, Noah Lamanna
written by Sook-Yin Lee, Joanne Sarazen, based on the graphic novel by Chester Brown
directed by Sook-Yin Lee

by Bill Chambers Paying for It director Sook-Yin Lee is the ex-girlfriend of Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown. They broke up in the late ’90s when Lee fell in love with another man but continued living together. Overhearing the petty squabbles between Lee and his replacement, Chester gained a new appreciation for bachelorhood and swore off romantic relationships for good. To satisfy his sexual needs, he began to frequent prostitutes and, over the next few years, amassed enough material for a graphic novel. Part confessional memoir, part manifesto arguing for the decriminalization of prostitution, Paying for It was published in 2011 with an introduction by the king of porny cartoons himself, R. Crumb, who describes Brown as “a real connoisseur in the world of professional sex workers.” Now Lee has adapted the, er, fruits of Brown’s labour for the screen–which is quite the lede in itself (Woman Makes Movie of Ex’s Autobiography), but she also accounts for her whereabouts during Chester’s misadventures, fleshing out her ghostly appearances on the page into a full-blown character arc. Women have been consigned to the fringes of so many biopics that an artist’s former lover hacking into his autobiography feels nothing short of radically feminist. It’s also something of a tonic, as the book’s blunt assessments of the ladies Brown solicits can read as casual misogyny.

The Silent Planet

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Silent Planet

August 1, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/****
starring Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton
written and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules

by Walter Chaw Jeffrey St. Jules’s The Silent Planet, despite a small detail about hypoxia, doesn’t appear to be the long-awaited franchise adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.” Rather, it occupies a space with Duncan Jones’s Moon, Walter Hill’s Supernova, David Fincher’s Alien3, and especially Jack Smight’s “Twilight Zone” episode “The Lonely,” in which poor James A. Corey (Jack Warden), a murderer sentenced to solitary confinement on a remote asteroid, is suddenly given a mysterious female companion (Jean Marsh) to ease the horror of his days. The aging murderer sentenced to Life in The Silent Planet is Theodore (Elias Koteas). Terminally ill and convinced that “alien gas” is making him revisit unpleasant episodes from his past, he carves out the monitoring device embedded in his chest, triggering an automated system to presume him dead and ship out his replacement: convicted terrorist Niyya (Briana Middleton). Niyya, orphaned as a child and raised by an alien race called the “Oieans” (who look vaguely like how C.S. Lewis described his pfifltriggi–but again, the film is not based on his Out of the Silent Planet), is understandably embittered about the human government sanctioning the oppression and genocide of her adopted people. Resigned to her fate, she’s unhappy to learn she’s sharing her interstellar oubliette with some nutsy old dude who’s clearly Going Through Something.

Kryptic

Fantasia Festival ’24: Kryptic; The Beast Within; Vulcanizadora; Animalia Paradoxa

July 30, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, UK, Werewolf

KRYPTIC
*½/****
starring Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir
written by Paul Bromley
directed by Kourtney Roy

THE BEAST WITHIN
*/****
starring James Cosmo, Ashleigh Cummings, Kit Harington, Caoilinn Springall
written by Greer Ellison & Alexander J. Farrell
directed by Alexander J. Farrell

VULCANIZADORA
***½/****
starring Melissa Blanchard, Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Solo Potrykus
written and directed by Joel Potrykus

ANIMALIA PARADOXA
****/****
starring Andrea Gomez, Daniela Ossa, Javiera Reyes, Hormazábal Rocío
written and directed by Niles Atallah

by Walter Chaw The problem with Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic is that its subtext is text. It’s well-shot, well-performed, even has some nice Yuzna-esque goop effects, but it’s so didactic that all that hardly matters. When the message becomes exposition, it indicates a lack of faith in both the audience and the material. I’m as tired of writing about this as you are of reading about it, I’m sure, and I must confess it takes a lot out of me nowadays to finish films like this, however well-made and however promising its director might be, should they ever get out of their own way. Kryptic would be less frustrating if it weren’t so good in so many ways. It opens with shy, socially anxious Kay (Chloe Pirrie) on her drive to a guided cryptid hike, repeating positive affirmations to buck herself up for meeting new people and maybe making new friends. In the woods, she strays from the group and encounters the terrifying Sooka (glimpsed only in flashes), sending her into a fugue state wherein she forgets who she is and what she does. “I’m a dentist?” she asks. “I’m a veterinarian?” Most likely, she’s a cryptozoologist named “Barb” who has been missing in these woods for some time. Also likely is that Barb went missing because she was fleeing her abusive husband, Morgan (Jeff Gladstone).

Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

July 26, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Cage in Longlegs

Longlegs (2024)

July 16, 2024Posted in2024, Canada, Crime, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt
written and directed by Oz Perkins

by Walter Chaw Thematically, at least, Oz Perkins reminds me most of Sofia Coppola, in that all of his films are autobiographical examinations of the relationship between isolated, creative, depressed children and their absent parents. Not abusive parents, mind (not exactly, in any case)–more parents lost in labyrinths in the company of goblin kings. Perkins uses negative space to suggest presence in the way that absence can become a palpable thing. Not a state in which one could lurk, but the lurker itself. After a parent is gone, they’re not really gone, because the space they used to occupy can take over all the light in your world. It’s a shadow of a naught. It happens when you’re not paying attention, and it happens because the absence of what is essential becomes physical in time. The golem of being forgotten is still preferable to being alone. I have the image in my head of Frankenstein and the little girl he drowns out of love. Their filmographies, Perkins’s and Coppola’s, are exquisite autopsies of the various forms the friendship takes between golden orphans and their parents. They tell it in the way their parents might understand them. It is their gilded grief that guided them to their seat behind the camera. Film is their native language, and so what they write in it is fulsome and tactile, full of subtext raw and personal. It is the cinema of solipsism, and it tends to be beautiful, self-indulgent by nature. And sometimes, but not always, it can even resonate with lost children vibrating at the same strange frequencies.

Fantasia 2024

Fantasia Festival ’24: Introduction

July 11, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw There is such a thing as a “festival glow”: the consequence of seeing something new in the company of other zealots while the creators, more often than not, crouch in the wings, hungry for first reactions. There are catered parties and lanyards and the promise of “breaking” the next hot moment, or catching the crest of it before it peaks. It’s a social-media phenomenon now, but distribution companies were always caught up in it. Every year, Sundance will produce a “sure thing” that’s only that one time out of ten. I can’t say I’ve always been immune to the effects of the glow. Biases are hard to root out, and there’s a reason filmmakers want their films to debut at certain festivals and maybe not others. Imagined to be egalitarian, festivals are, after all, anything but. Still, I’ve always loved Canada’s Fantasia Festival, a celebration of genre that has consistently programmed the outer limits of the proverbial envelope in defiance of any boardroom interest that might water down its presentation. Each year I’ve done it, I’ve seen at least one movie that made my end-of-year list. Whenever I sit down to watch a Fantasia film, I expect to see a new favourite.

In a Violent Nature

In a Violent Nature (2024)

June 28, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Lauren Taylor
written and directed by Chris Nash

by Walter Chaw Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is wonderful on a technical level, but I’m suspicious of its motives. The best you could say about it is that if it likes slasher movies, it likes them for what seems like many of the wrong reasons; and the worst you could say is that maybe it doesn’t like slasher movies at all. At best, it doesn’t understand them and, because of that, doesn’t respect them. And because of that, I had a feeling it was mocking them–like being caught in an awkward conversation with someone explaining something you love back to you as something they think is, at its heart, a silly distraction. (Or, in this case, a vacuous dispenser of cheap thrills.) I suspect In a Violent Nature‘s primary influences were not, despite a few superficial call-outs, Twitch of the Death Nerve or Halloween or even the more atavistic Friday the 13th saga, a series commonly misread as shallow and puerile. No, what it most resembles is Gun Media’s asymmetrical third-person, open-world Friday the 13th survival game from 2017, which allows you to play as hockey-masked Jason Voorhees while a camera follows you over your right shoulder, Dardenne Brothers-style. The difference is that the video game has Jason’s mother’s voice urging him on, coddling him with warmth when he’s dispatched another victim, thus giving him a constant prod to engage in various, fruitless attempts to be a dutiful son, the desired offspring of a lost parent. The video game, in other words, sees the slasher as a vehicle at some level for exorcizing mental disturbances caused by abandonment and unrequited love for a parent. In a Violent Nature is essentially the feature-length version of that brilliant Geico commercial where a group of twentysomething idiots eschew a running automobile and hide behind a wall of chainsaws in a well-lit kill shed instead.

If

If (2024)

May 27, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Steve Carell
written and directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw The message of John Krasinski’s excruciating If is that you are never too old to have an imaginary friend–or, rather, you will never be so old that you won’t need an imaginary friend. Let’s all just sit with that for a minute. Work it around in your head. You will never…be so old…that you won’t need…an imaginary friend. Is that a warning? A promise of mental decline? Is the innocence and happiness of childhood synonymous with having an imaginary friend? The presumption is that imaginary friends are good things and that everyone has had one, you see, and one of the tragedies of growing up is that you forget your imaginary friend. Except there’s this adorable little Asian kid (Alan Kim, already needing a new agent) who doesn’t seem to have one for some reason, so I’m already starting to lose the thread that’s connecting this world. Do all kids have imaginary friends except Asian kids? Why is that? Is it a cultural ban? A deficiency? The fuck is going on? Another premise in If is that once kids forget about their imaginary friends, they disappear–except they don’t disappear, they’re still there but invisible to their former childhood pals. Bea (Cailey Fleming, who is great; this is not her fault) can see them, though. Bea is afraid she’s about to be orphaned. Bea is possibly a monster. Maybe there aren’t rules in If. Maybe it’s madness or hallucination, a psychedelic freakout or, better yet, a true sequel to the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone”, which I know did have a sequel, but here’s another one. Work with me here.

'Cause I'm the Unknown Blunt-Man: Gosling and Blunt in The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy (2024)

May 4, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham
written by Drew Pearce
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I watched David Leitch’s The Fall Guy the same way I try to spot a particularly well-camouflaged insect in a terrarium: with a little disgust, a little fascination, a little fear of the uncanny. You know when you know something’s there but you can’t see it? Could be the terrarium keepers are playing a trick, though, right? Could be there’s just a stick in there. By all accounts, real people made and executed The Fall Guy, but who can tell these days without some kind of Voight-Kampff detector? The film is ostensibly based on the classic five-season run of a Lee Majors television show I watched religiously as a kid, though I only retained the theme song (“Unknown Stuntman,” performed by Majors himself), so naturally, I rewatched the entire first season of it to rekindle my crush on Heather Thomas and confirm there’s no real connection between it and the film. The movie does seem to share some elements with Richard Rush’s cult classic The Stunt Man (1980), but it eschews the naked paranoia and strident social commentary. It shares some cosmetic elements with Robert Mandel’s F/X (1986) and its underestimated sequel (F/X 2 (1991)), too. Ultimately, the best analogue in terms of how weird it feels is John McTiernan’s meta-movie Last Action Hero (1993), only without the relative cleverness of a concept higher than “stuntmen do stunts.”

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

March 24, 2024Posted in2024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace
written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
directed by Gil Kenan

by Walter Chaw Walking out of the Westland Twin into the bright June sun in 1984, my best friend and I agreed that Ghostbusters was the best movie we’d ever seen. Just two 11-year-old idiots in the first week of summer vacation, drunk on soda and popcorn and full to the brim with the magic of being young and stupid. It’s a memory I’ll always treasure, this anecdote from the matinee of my filmgoing experience. I wouldn’t love movies as much as I do if not for the films I saw between 1983 and 1989, that period where I was the most receptive, the most vulnerable, the right amount of inexperienced and ignorant. Movies, for a while, were my secret sharer, my parents, my priest-confessor, my first lover. The Blockbuster Age shaped my tastes, and eventually movies pointed a direction for me to pursue in life through their analysis and contextualization. If I could understand them, the thinking went, maybe I could start to understand my childhood. The me watching Ghostbusters 40 years later finds it to be painful. The experience of that first viewing is so different from my reaction to it now, it’s hard to believe they’re the same film. Age provides an interesting parallax. Ghostbusters is a supernatural Caddyshack hang-out flick that shares the misfortune of being curdled by that specific early-’80s, OG SNL/National Lampoon arrogance, sloth, and nastiness. The best part of it is Rick Moranis, because everything Rick Moranis does in it is unforced. The worst part is the rest, in which may-as-well-be Catskills-veterans peddle their cocaine-fueled shtick, which is aging about as well as Henny Youngman’s and Soupy Sales’s were at the time.