Comedy Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton in front of a plane crash: "If only the pilot and the first officer had communicated with each other"

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

June 13, 20252025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

By Angelo Muredda Midway through Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a stateless arms dealer and industrialist hated by any number of governments, drops everything to visit Marty (Jeffrey Wright), a shipping magnate from Newark, to muscle him into upping his investment in the titular scheme: a dicey Middle Eastern infrastructure deal. Physically tethered to Marty in the middle of a blood transfusion that’s necessitated by a gunshot wound he acquired in the course of securing his share from a sketchy French ally named Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), Korda pushes the deal by pulling the tab of the hand grenade he brought Marty as a peace offering (the way some might bring chocolate), insisting he’ll put it back only if his pal increases his share. Unfazed by the threat of mutually assured destruction, Marty, a universal donor who’s already pushing blood from his body into Korda’s with a hand pump, pledges to give his financial share and more, “just to watch the grand finale.”

Guy being sucked through hole in an airplane: "No ticket!"

Fight or Flight (2025)

May 8, 20252025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Charithra Chandran, Marko Zaror, Katee Sackhoff
written by Brooks McLaren & D.J. Cotrona
directed by James Madigan

by Walter Chaw I remember the thrill I felt when I heard the premise: a plane full of murderers is freed to go hog on one another with impunity. Maniacs and assassins, right? Hannibal Lecters and spree killers and cons and bounty hunters. Fuck, I thought, it’s gonna be like one of those Universal Monsters “rally” movies where Frankenstein fights the Wolf Man or some shit; imagine the possibilities! The mayhem! I remember it like it was yesterday because it was 1997, and when you get old, things that happened almost 30 years ago seem like they happened the day before. Man, oh man, it’s good to talk. Anyway, James Madigan’s Fight or Flight is about a plane full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. It’s got the same frenetic energy as David Leitch’s Bullet Train, which is about a train full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. To be fair, Leitch’s film is centred around a handsome white guy with a secret everyone is after, whereas Fight or Flight hinges on a handsome white guy everyone is after but there’s also a young woman (Charithra Chandran) who is more than she seems. No, wait, that’s Bullet Train, too.

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

April 9, 20252025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers
screenplay by Chris Bowman & Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener & Gavin James and Chris Galletta
directed by Jared Hess

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to get knives out to hack at the hanks of the great beast. It’s tempting to sharpen your tongue to shriek at it, how close we are now to Idiocracy‘s prophecy of Ass: The Movie being the most watched and awarded film in the land. I keep coming back to the image of Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, peering through the fourth wall to tell you it’s too late. They’re here already. The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can’t feel shame. As it was never alive, you can’t kill it, and if you can’t kill it, neither can you bury it. You can fight, but you’ll lose. Not to the great beast, but to your friends and neighbours, who will urge you to forget it, take it easy. They will rationalize that some garbage piece of media was made for children, as if the things we make for children should be terrible. Feed them the rotten stuff, the maggot-infested stuff–they won’t know. Give them the chair with the splinters; the toy that takes eyes; the water full of lead. Why worry? It’s just for kids. It’s just for kids you don’t think will grow up or don’t care if they do. It’s cheaper not to let them live. When they consume, that’s less for you to consume. Maybe we should change our laws so they can work longer when they’re younger, because they don’t seem to last as long as they used to. Lie back and enjoy it. Pray you never get that direction outside of invitations to kid’s movies. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they’re not. Your loved ones are dead. I’m sorry.

Jack Quaid with a knife through his hand: "No more Mr. Knife Guy."

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

March 28, 20252025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Horror, South Africa, Theatrical

BORDERLINE
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Eric Dane
written and directed by Jimmy Warden

NOVOCAINE
*/****
starring Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Matthew Walsh
written by Lars Jacobson
directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

by Walter Chaw Samara Weaving is the best Bruce Campbell since Bruce Campbell. They even worked together on the “Ash vs Evil Dead” show. Her timing is impeccable, her control over her physicality and facial expressions prodigious. She seems to have emerged specifically to anchor horror slapsticks like the second coming of Mabel Normand: a screwball Venus on a meshuga clamshell. Her short filmography is already heavy with cult classics like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and Joe Lynch’s fantastic Mayhem–each savvy enough to highlight Weaving’s charming, self-deprecating sense of humour. In another time, she would’ve given Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett a run for their money. She’s the dream improv partner, a champion bull rider. I don’t think there’s a scenario she wouldn’t seem unnatural in–no situation you could ask her characters to overcome that is too absurd. She’s a unicorn: the great beauty men think they might have a chance with and women don’t entirely resent. In her very small cameo in Babylon, she provides a tantalizing glimpse into what that film could have been with her in the lead instead of the ego doppelgänger to her id, Margot Robbie. Not good, mind you, but at least well-cast.

The Electric State (2025)

March 15, 20252025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the book by Simon Stålenhag
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw The Russos’ The Electric State is one of those movies where every other line is punctuated by an exhausted wisecrack from a passerby, a member of the faceless chorus, or the sassy, Black-coded sidekick. A mess, in other words; a loud one. What makes it an interesting skidmark along the road to our national humiliation, though, is how it feels like the first salvo in the kind of corporate warfare predicted by The Crimson Permanent Assurance and Demolition Man‘s triumphant, Michelin-starred Taco Bell. See, The Electric State is set in a post-robopocalyptic wasteland where the robot slave class are the invention of Walt Disney–adorable agents of meat-genocide led by a sentient, Hugs-a-lot-sounding Mr. Peanut™ (Woody Harrelson™), who, during the film’s extended prologue, solemnly signs a peace treaty with deepfake Bill Clinton after his Elon Musk, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), invents humanoid robot drones. The “good guys,” then, defeat Disney! Does that make Netflix, the never-been-profitable streaming service bankrolling this Hindenburg and currently at open-platform warfare with the Mouse, the “good guys?” What of the newsreel aside that Kid Rock gave a celebratory concert upon the vanquishing of When You Wish Upon a Skynet? Is Kid Rock the anti-corporate, humanist good guy now? Or was that an unfunny insert mandated in Chris Pratt’s rider? What the actual fuck is going on?

Pattinson in Mickey 17: "Oh Mickey you’re so fine/you’re so fine you blew my mind 17 times/hey Mickey!"

Mickey 17 (2025)

March 10, 20252025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, South Korea

***/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo
written and directed by Bong Joon Ho

by Walter Chaw Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is a philosophical sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, expanding on that movie’s satire of an overly-militarized American Imperialist fascist state to talk about how we are at the mercy of trillionaire megalomaniacs who, because they’ve been social outcasts their entire lives, have interstellar plans for colonization tied to their specific visions of a master race. It’s another film that uses a civilization of alien bugs as a stand-in for a culture selected to be murdered, displaced, and exploited made by a foreign filmmaker who sees Americans as they are: so beguiled by money they’d trade their lives for a corporation’s. The people pushing us in Mickey 17′s direction will interpret it as a mandate, not a condemnation.

The 4:30 Movie (2024) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

February 27, 20252024, 2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Austin Zajur, Nicholas Cirillo, Reed Northrup, Ken Jeong
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Bill Chambers What is Kevin Smith’s most personal film to date? Inveterate online cinephiles trapped in a parasocial relationship with him such as myself might say it’s still his first, Clerks, a comic ode to the plight of the American convenience-store worker shot at the very same Quik Stop that employed him at the time. Or is it Chasing Amy, a movie that allegorizes Smith’s burgeoning romance with actress Joey Lauren Adams, for whom he wrote the female lead? Could it be Jersey Girl, his fantasy of widowhood and single-fatherhood and Ben Affleck-hood? Howzabout Clerks III, in which Smith used his “widowmaker” heart attack as a jumping-off point to tell the story of the making of Clerks? All good guesses, but according to Smith, his “most personal film to date” is his most recent, The 4:30 Movie, about three Jersey teens hanging out at the movies in the summer of ’86. The erstwhile Silent Bob has had alter egos before (Dante from Clerks, for instance, although in Clerks III Dante and Randal are possibly Kevin Smith split in two), but not like Brian David (Austin Zajur), a stocky film geek with the gift of gab.

Paddington Bear writing in a journal: Dear Diary, Timothy Treadwell was delicious.

Paddington in Peru (2024)

February 22, 20252024, 2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, France, Japan, Mystery, UK

*/****
starring Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Ben Whishaw
screenplay by Mark Burton, Jon Foster & James Lamont
directed by Dougal Wilson

by Walter Chaw Remember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” where the gang goes to Hawaii and finds a cursed Tiki idol? That was hilarious. What I mean is it was memorably not hilarious, a brazen and desperate last gasp at relevance and invention that is held up alongside the “Happy Days” where Fonzie waterskis over a shark as shorthand for what happens when a beloved institution runs out of ideas: the death wave of a drowning man. Anyway, the third instalment of the Paddington franchise uproots the Browns of Windsor Gardens and drops them in the middle of a rainforest in search of a horrifying convent filthy with energetic British nuns given to random outbursts of song that are less delightful than pointedly aggressive. Imagine Olivia Colman, dialled to 11, decked out in full habit, keening a single, held high note for a full 20 seconds, and you have a small taste of the unpleasantness of this probably unintentional nunsploitation horror. Call it “Bleak Narcissus.” Gone is the charm of the previous Paddingtons, and with it the focus on absolute patience and kindness that made this series such a balm to the brutal and inconsiderate hell of our day-to-day. In its place? A jungle quest punctuated by elaborate pratfalls as cuddly Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) tries to recover his dementia-addled Great Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) from an unplanned walkabout in the wilderness of Peru. The step down from gentle grace to broad slapstick is an ankle-breaker.

Nightbitch (2024) + Babygirl (2024)

December 14, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller

NIGHTBITCH
**/****
starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy
based on the novel by Rachel Yoder
written for the screen and directed by Marielle Heller

BABYGIRL
**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde
written and directed by Halina Reijn

by Walter Chaw I’m sick of watching films about unhappy, beautiful, rich white people. You’ll forgive me. Maybe one day, I’ll regain the appetite to try to relate to the existential malaise they suffer in the face of their extraordinary privilege, their boring sex lives, their quotidian successes at the tops of various social ladders. To the winners go the spoils, as they say, but at least have the discretion to be grateful or, failing the urge to whine, the decency to be entertaining. In 2024, when the United States chose fascism on the back of a wave of populist xenophobia and white nationalism, I admired mid-life performances from Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson in mediocre but vaunted films rueing the loss of their legendary beauty in a culture that made them famous for, at least in part, their legendary beauty. Once objects of desire, they’ve come to have regrets. Me, too. I played my part in dehumanizing them in my time. It’s complicated.

SDAFF ’24: Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts + Stranger

November 29, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Norway, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

BEN AND SUZANNE: A REUNION IN 4 PARTS
***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Anastasia Olowin
written and directed by Shaun Seneviratne

STRANGER
局外⼈
**½/****
starring Jin Jing, Liguo Yuan, Baohe Xue
written and directed by Zhengfan Yang

by Walter Chaw There’s a sense of suspension in hotel rooms, a weight accrued from the parade of temporary occupants, somehow–cosmic luggage left behind. There’s possibility in hotel rooms. You can be who you want to be and someone else will clean up after you, make it seem like you were never really there, prime the pump for the next in line. There’s freedom in that, and threat, too, a practical reminder that you are temporary and once you have gone, the world will, by design, rush to fill the space you abandoned. Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts begins in a guest suite and ends in a series of hotel rooms as nebbish Ben (Sathya Sridharan) visits his girlfriend Suzanne (Anastasia Olowin), who’s away on a three-month business trip in Sri Lanka. She works for a program that’s ostensibly for the development of small, women-run companies, but lately it’s devolved into the odious task of collecting loans for the bank. “I only went to the bank because of you,” says one of Suzanne’s clients as she’s asking for more time to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, and I thought of Darth Vader on Cloud City telling Lando to pray he doesn’t alter the terms of their agreement further. Suzanne’s task, already ugly, is made uglier by the fact that she’s a white woman and all of the women who trusted her are brown. This isn’t what the film is about, though in time you realize it’s at the base of what everything’s about.

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

November 20, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Horror, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

LOVE LIES
我談的那場戀愛
*/****
starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin Fu, Stephy Tang
written by Hing-Ka Chan, Miu-Kei Ho
directed by Miu-Kei Ho

DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY
鬼才之道
*/****
starring Chen Bo-lin, Gingle Wang, Sandrine Pinna
written by John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
directed by John Hsu

by Walter Chaw I want to grant that comedy is difficult to translate. But it’s not impossible–there are enough examples to the contrary to make this a specious argument–so I’m willing to give Hong Kong film Love Lies and Taiwan’s Dead Talents Society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they play better in their native cultures and tongues. Maybe they’re better with an audience–some films are, you know. Or maybe not. Maybe this middlebrow, low-aspiring, derivative dreck receives the same kind of derision everywhere and we’re not so different after all. It’s not a matter of cultural superiority, mind; in suggesting the delicacies of humour can be lost in translation, I’m not saying that Chinese people are incapable of detecting garbage when presented with it. I have to tell you, though, that both of these films are multiple nominees at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (frickin 11 for Dead Talents Society by itself)–our cultures are not so far apart when it comes to giving out movie awards. I’ll also acknowledge some personal bias in reviewing Asian pictures: a toxic brew of barely understood self-loathing and the deep-rooted desire not to be lumped in with behaviours that could be coded as racially humiliating or even, at times, identifying. It’s like using the word “honoured” around white people: I try not to do it. This is a long way of saying Love Lies and Dead Talents Society are technically well-made films that vibrate at frequencies I can, incongruously, neither hear nor tolerate. Your mileage may vary.

Red One (2024)

November 14, 20242024, 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.

SDAFF ’24: A Traveler’s Needs + By the Stream

November 13, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

A TRAVELER’S NEEDS
여행자의 필요
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Kwon Haehyo, Lee Hyeyoung
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

BY THE STREAM
수유천
**½/****
starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw At this point, it’s not that one watches a Hong Sang-soo joint so much as one sits with it companionably, like a chaperoned Victorian date, a slightly alcoholic drink in hand to lubricate the passage of unpredictable chunks of awkward chit-chat. Free of exposition or any narrative of consequence, his stuff is just suggestions of hints of scenarios given to his cast of regulars; then Master Hong sits back to watch how the various elements fall into place. There’s occasional magic among the literal obfuscations (one of his 2023 films, In Water, was shot entirely out of focus on purpose), those tiny sparks between people that define human attraction and other sundry frictions. You’re paying such close attention that a hitch of breath or glint in the eye can feel like revolutionary insight. More, you’re so desperate for meaning that you will attach it to gossamer inference, a will-o-the-wisp made of listlessness and… Is it boredom? It’s not free of boredom.

A Different Man (2024)

October 7, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, John Keating
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at a recent Lincoln Center screening of his new meta dramedy A Different Man for New Directors/New Films, Aaron Schimberg suggested the project was inspired in part by the loaded reaction to his depiction of disability in Chained for Life, his previous film. Chained for Life cast Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, as an actor with the same condition playing a sanitarium patient in a dodgy European arthouse film-within-the-film about a mad surgeon restoring his disabled charges to normalcy through radical experimentation. Some critics, Schimberg claims, wondered whether it might not be inherently exploitative to cast Pearson and other visibly disabled actors–many of whom, like Schimberg (who has a cleft palate), had facial differences–in a send-up of disability tropes about deformity and beauty. Others would surely have balked at the opposite approach, were he to have burlesqued disability by hiring non-disabled actors to star in a postmodern examination of the aesthetic and ethical traps of disability on film. Why not split the difference and make everyone unhappy with his follow-up, Schimberg thought, by pitting Sebastian Stan, a non-disabled actor playing a disabled protagonist in search of a cure, against Pearson as his obnoxious frenemy–a disabled man as gregarious and comfortable in his own skin as Stan’s character is desperate to crawl out of his?

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

September 26, 20242024, 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.

TIFF ’24: Conclave + Emilia Pérez

September 20, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, France, Musical, Thriller, TIFF, UK

CONCLAVE
**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Edward Berger

EMILIA PÉREZ
*/****
starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz
written and directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda Knives Out at the Vatican: That’s the basic elevator pitch for Edward Berger’s Conclave, which follows the politically loaded secret process to elect a new Pope following the death of his predecessor under shadowy circumstances. Adapted by Peter Straughan from Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, Berger’s follow-up to the very serious and very loud All Quiet on the Western Front promises a frothier, pulpier good time, and for a while, it delivers one, having some fun with its cloistered setting of hushed hallway meetings, its colourful cast of red-draped snippy cardinals, and its tight 72-hour timeframe, where anything seems possible. Before long, though, Conclave begins to sag under the weight of its pretension to justify the effortful production design (including an ambitiously but pointlessly recreated Sistine Chapel), overwrought musical and editing flourishes, and fraught setting, and to say something–anything, really–about current affairs: gender diversity in the Church, the war between nativism and pluralism, you name it.

TIFF ’24: Young Werther + Friendship

September 18, 20242024, 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.

TIFF ’24: Anora

September 14, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Ivy Wolk, Karren Karagulian
written and directed by Sean Baker

By Angelo Muredda Early in the second act of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora, Toros (Baker staple Karren Karagulian), a rumpled Armenian fixer arriving on the scene of what ought to be a straightforward extraction job, notices the broken glass and smashed furnishings before him, and asks what happened. Baker’s camera follows Toros’s perspective as he takes in the fruits of the expertly crafted, lengthy screwball set-piece preceding his arrival, with the grim visual punchline of a young woman bound with a phone wire, gagged with a scarf, and propped up on one of his colleagues’ laps. The joke, at the expense of his ignorance and our knowledge of eponymous heroine Ani (Mikey Madison), the bound woman, is that the bulk of the damage hasn’t been done by his meathead colleagues but by her, in a feral act of self-defense that falls somewhere between the survival tactics of Road Runner and Kevin McAllister.

Dafoe and Bob in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

September 9, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Somehow lugubrious at under 100 minutes, overburdened by five or six storylines and an unnecessary new lead character who dominates its first half, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice leans hard on Burton’s established weaknesses while largely ignoring his established strengths. It treats women like shrill caricatures, for instance, saving its deepest contempt for Monica Bellucci’s Mrs. Beetlejuice, Delores, a bride so ‘Zilla she reconstitutes herself from her violently dismembered parts for the sole purpose of reuniting with her lost love and murderer, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Lydia (Winona Ryder), the little girl lost from the first film who, by the end, discovered adoptive parents in the now-absent Maitlands, has grown into a ghost-hunting television charlatan engaged to unctuous workshop SNAG Rory (Justin Theroux). As Rory, Theroux appears to be doing Phil Hartman doing Glenn “Otho” Shadix and is asked to carry the comedic load of this thing for far too long. (It’s like showing up for Patti Lupone and getting fucking Florence Foster Jenkins for an hour.) Then there’s young Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s kid, who resents her mother for being a nutjob and her dad (Santiago Cabrera) for becoming piranha food early in her life.

TIFF ’24: Paying for It

September 6, 20242024, 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.