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Telluride ’18: The Front Runner

September 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Telluride, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina
written by Matt Bai & Jay Carson & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In 1988, Gary Hart, the democratic former senator from my home state of Colorado, was the front runner for the Presidency of the United States. About a week before the primary, which would have cemented his ascendancy to a post seemingly all but preordained, this guy–classically handsome, tall, masculine, progressive–did what powerful men in privileged positions sometimes do: he slept with a young woman who wanted a job with his campaign. That’s a problem, but the problem is he dared the WASHINGTON POST to follow him; he touted his ethics and morals as a foundational plank to his platform, and when the MIAMI HERALD took him up on his dare, they discovered that he was maybe a serial philanderer who in those last halcyon days before the Internet, hadn’t learned the voracious appetite the public has for a good, sleazy story concerning the tragic fall of kings. It’s hardly ever the crime–it’s almost always the cover-up. And in 1988, Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner says, politicians weren’t very good at the cover-up. Largely because the press was complicit in helping politicians, athletes, and other powerful men in powerful spheres keep sexual dalliances and abuses quiet. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, after all.

Telluride ’18: The Old Man & the Gun

September 1, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Telluride

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek
written and directed by David Lowery

by Walter Chaw David Lowery follows up his enigmatic A Ghost Story with this slobbery, open-mouthed kiss to Robert Redford, in his alleged swan song to screen acting. Redford plays real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker, who, in a blue suit and stupid hat, resumes his long career of traumatizing tellers and imparting folksy aphorisms after escaping from San Quentin. Seeing this life as his calling, Tucker was oft-described as seeming "happy," and so that's the tactic Lowery and Redford take towards this material, presenting everything as this bucolic Americana bullshit of the variety the elderly and the elderly-at-heart, especially, get off on and which Redford has made his stock-in-trade in his dotage. The only thing missing is an early-bird buffet as patrons enter the theatre. Tom Waits and Danny Glover play Tucker's sometime-partners in crime and poor Sissy Spacek is enlisted as his gal Jewel ("Well, y'sure look it!") to deliver "good-natured" to the assembled. Yes, Redford, one of the most exceptional and brilliant actors in film history, is now delivering the patented Robert Duvall elderly performance: repeating phrases, smiling in a non-specific way, and patting people's hands as they talk, complete with a wired hearing aid dangling from his ear.

FrightFest ’18: A Young Man with High Potential

August 31, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Germany, Thriller

***/****
starring Adam Ild Rohweder, Paulina Galazka, Pit Bukowski, Amanda Plummer
written by Anna de Paoli & Linus de Paoli
directed by Linus de Paoli

by Walter Chaw The storyline goes like this: Rey, the young woman in the new Star Wars trilogy, is a "Mary Sue"–a term used to describe a female character who is born fully-formed and, therefore, undeserving of her status as the hero of the story, any story. It's an argument made by mediocre men, usually mediocre white men, who have gathered together over social media to share their frustrations about how, essentially, their own worthiness has never been recognized by a world designed, now, to overlook and disdain them. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The parallel storyline is that women are usually murdered by men they know–ex-lovers or spurned would-be lovers–and that the best indicator for murderous gun violence is a history of domestic violence. We hold these truths now to be self-evident. And suddenly these mediocre men who used to get pushed into lockers and demeaned for their solitary interests are the masters of our culture, our industry, our government. There were warnings about this in films like The Last American Virgin and Revenge of the Nerds, remembering that the triumphant happy ending of the latter entailed one of the nerd heroes raping the girlfriend of the lead jock…and the girlfriend liking it a lot. Masculinity has always been this mash of the tragic and the toxic. It's irresolvable, though at least there can be better awareness.

FrightFest ’18: The Night Sitter

August 30, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

***/****
starring Elyse Dufour, Jack Champion, Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum
written and directed by John Rocco and Abiel Bruhn

by Walter Chaw From the first synth chords of Rob Himebaugh's awesome '80s-inspired score; from the first glimpse of DP Scotty G. Field's gorgeous, neon-soaked lighting schemes; from the first look at world-weary heroine Amber (Elyse Dufour), herself a feat of lighting and colour coordination, The Night Sitter announces itself to be a major player. Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco's feature debut, it covers one really bad night in the life of poor, terrified Kevin (Jack Champion). His dad (Joe Walz) a wannabe reality-show host of one of those paranormal shows, hires Amber to sit for him and his girlfriend's (Deanna Meske) horrible kid, Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), leaving them alone with a locked door, behind which are all the demonic artifacts dad's been hoarding throughout his misspent career. That he's a loser is never a question (he times his reel to "accidentally" play for the benefit of pretty Amber), but he's a rich loser–meaning that as soon as dad is gone on his date, Amber calls her friends (Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum, J. Benedict Larmore) to come help her loot the place. Unfortunately, Ronnie has found where dad keeps the key to the demon room.

FrightFest ’18: F.U.B.A.R. (2018)

August 25, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

**½/**** written by Ben Kent & Joel Wilenius directed by Ben Kent by Walter Chaw A lark, and often a good one, in the Very Bad Things vein where murder spoils an evening of debauchery, Ben Kent's feature debut F.U.B.A.R. offers up a twist by setting its shenanigans at one of those paintball courses where people pretend to be zombies for the pleasure of the armed guests. It's a bachelor party for nebbish Sam (Sean Verey), who, saddled with his obnoxious chums, hopes the weekend goes well so he can impress his future father-in-law, Gerald (Mark Heap)--Gerald being an ex-Navy…

Support the Girls (2018)

August 24, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, Shayna McHale
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

by Angelo Muredda A relaxed, low-stakes counterpart of sorts to Boots Riley's more amped-up Sorry To Bother You, Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls is about as good as movies about labour, power, and empathy for one's fellow worker get. The marketing materials have emphasized the ostensible hijinks wrought by the film's Hooters knockoff setting, pitching Support the Girls as a more conventionally satisfying ensemble comedy than the rambling micro-budget indies with which Bujalski made his mark–a natural next step, after Results, in his post-Computer Chess evolution into the mid-budget range. Its uncharacteristically glossier colour palette and hooky premise aside, though, Support the Girls is a refreshingly rumpled affair that's squarely in the Bujalski tradition, more than earning its cathartic closing moments of a trio of exploited bar workers' collective rooftop scream into the abyss by taking every opportunity available to be the anti-Garden State: a film that prizes character over manufactured quirk and genuine workaday ennui over dopey existentialism.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

August 8, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
written by Charlie Wachtel & David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, based on the book by Ron Stallworth
directed by Spike Lee

by Walter Chaw Colorado Springs is a big, modern, beautiful city. It's home to natural wonders like the Tolkien-sounding Garden of the Gods and the Cave of the Winds. Its zoo, perched on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, is world class. Spencer Penrose built a shrine to his friend Will Rogers on that same mountain when Rogers died in a plane crash. Cheyenne Mountain is also where NORAD is housed, and Colorado Springs is also host to the United States Air Force Academy and, once upon a time, Focus on the Family. It's an ultra-conservative city just south of blue Denver, which is itself south of the trust-fund hippie commune of Boulder. And for a few years starting around 1925, there was no greater stronghold for the Klan in the United States than in Denver. In 1978, Ron Stallworth became the first African-American police officer hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department, and then the first detective when he went undercover to infiltrate a Kwame Ture speech at a black nightclub. In 1979, he answered an ad hoping to establish a chapter of the KKK in the Springs, posing over the telephone as a man who hated every non-white race, but especially "those blacks." A white counterpart attended meetings while Stallworth eventually gained the trust of then-Grand Wizard David Duke. Duke reached out to Stallworth recently because he was concerned he was going to be portrayed as a buffoon in Spike Lee's adaptation of Stallworth's memoir, BlacKkKlansman. I mean, if the hood fits… If there is one indicator of involvement with cults like this, it's deep-seated insecurity. It bears mentioning that Denver's old airport, Stapleton International Airport, is the namesake of five-time Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton, who was a high-ranking member and, until the end of his reign, vocal supporter of the Klan. The airport is gone, but the neighbourhood that replaced it still carries his name.

Fantasia Festival ’18: One Cut of the Dead

August 8, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Zombie

***/****
written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a young woman (Yuzuki Akiyama) running for cover in an abandoned factory, but lo, her zombie boyfriend (Kazuaki Nagaya) proves inescapable, and sinks his teeth into her neck as she tells him she loves him one last time. Then a director (Takayuki Hamatsu) yells cut and proceeds to berate his actress for still not being realistically devastated after 42 takes. When he storms off in a huff, the actors commiserate and the makeup woman (Harumi Shuhama) chimes in with a little lore about the factory involving medical experiments on the dead. On cue, a “real” zombie appears, setting in motion a bloody chase through the studio and nearby woods as cast and crew unleash their inner Ash and struggle to evade the contageous bite of the infected. Lasting 37 minutes and unfolding as a “single” shot, this is a dumb but energetic sequence indebted as much to the climax of Children of Men as to any zombie movie (though particularly Romero’s–the undead are a nostalgic mint green). And then credits roll, and One Cut of the Dead flashes back one month earlier to the inception of what we just saw: a (fictitious) one-off for Japan’s Zombie Channel, also called “One Cut of the Dead” because it was shot live without any editing.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Born of Woman (short films)

August 6, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Finland, Horror, Ireland, Norway, Sci-Fi, Short Films, South Korea, Thriller

by Walter Chaw This is what I believe: I believe that men and women are essentially different and that those differences result in perspectives that are necessarily different. I don't consciously privilege one perspective over the other, but I acknowledge that I am not always aware of my prejudices. I think Wonder Woman would have been garbage if a man had directed it; and I think 20th Century Women, written and directed by a man, had beautiful roles for women. It's confusing and it can be exhausting, but at the end of the day, creating an equal opportunity for women and people of colour to tell stories (whether they're theirs or not) can only be good. So…

Fantasia Festival ’18: Rondo

July 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Drew Barnhardt by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party…

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)

July 20, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Kathy Driscoll-Mohler
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the book by John Callahan
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Angelo Muredda "I'm a sucker for quadriplegic movies," VARIETY critic Peter Debruge wrote of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot from Sundance, before criticism from disabled activists apparently inspired his editors to do some quiet and uncredited post-publication editing. Whatever its merits as a biopic of an outsider artist–dubious, given the cuddliness offensive of Danny Elfman's insistent score–or a "quadriplegic movie" (minimal, given that its subject, Oregon cartoonist John Callahan, was actually a paraplegic), Van Sant's return to movies people might conceivably care about is at least not so homogenous and tired as that backhanded praise suggests. It's hard to shake the feeling that the film is the belated two-birds-with-one-stone fulfilment of a business deal with Callahan, who died in 2010, and Robin Williams, who first optioned the story and once intended to play Callahan himself. Despite the whiff of old Tupperware leftovers that hangs about it, the film is pleasantly rumpled in the tradition of Van Sant's more interesting work–predictably boring in its rehashing of disability clichés, from casting to writing, yes, but formally unusual, and committed to the repetitive and potentially un-cinematic bootstrap work of self-improvement and forgiveness that movies about addicts and accident survivors tend to sail through.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

July 7, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer
written and directed by Boots Riley

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Boots Riley’s hyphenate debut Sorry to Bother You–it happens in the last third of the picture–that rang so pure and true to me I felt adrenalized, known, inspired. The best art does that: locates that juncture between expression and activism. I felt it during Get Out as I began to recognize the parties where I’d been the only minority guest and somehow also the guest of honour; I hope to feel it one day while watching something about the Asian-American experience. I’d always wondered about the black community coalescing around bootlegs of Seventies kung fu movies, but now I understand it as I find myself vibing to Janelle Monae’s and Childish Gambino’s energetic, pithy counterculture activism. Sorry to Bother You belongs to this moment of crisis. It’s a withering indictment of capitalism and the white ruling class in the United States as it’s metastasized into a machine that’s only ever interested in consuming its weakest, most underrepresented members. The running joke involves prison/work programs dressed up as a way for entire subsistence, formerly middle-class families to sell their lives to the proverbial “company store.” “WorryFree” promises freedom in endless toil. The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz and on the gate at Dachau promised something similar with “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”). In this way, the for-profit prison system in the land of the free is presented for mockery and shame. The idea that the corporate structure in the United States is akin to a prison is raised, too. If films are an empathy machine, this one is the “uncomfortable recognition generator” piece of it. These past eighteen months have been sobering for a lot of my white friends. Sorry to Bother You is a summary of what, until Trump, was easy to sweep under the carpet.

The Year of Spectacular Men (2018)

June 23, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

**½/****
starring Madelyn Deutch, Avian Jogia, Nicholas Braun, Zoey Deutch
written by Madelyn Deutch
directed by Lea Thompson

by Alice Stoehr Movie star Sabrina Klein sits in a bathtub, distraught. She bawls at her companion: “Can you try to be my big sister for one second of your life, please?” Her big sister Izzy is a wannabe actress who relies on Sabrina for housing and cushy work as an assistant; emotional maturity is not her métier. Nonetheless, she tries. “We should do a song,” she says, so they call up their mom and sing her “Give My Regards to Broadway.” They both perform with such gusto that this must be a tradition for them, a holdover from their shared childhood. These may be women in their mid-twenties, yet as they dance around the bathroom they seem momentarily like a couple of kids.

Incredibles 2 (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Around the midpoint of Brad Bird’s fantastic Incredibles 2, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) catches his son Dash (Huck Milner) on Dash’s way to the bus and pointedly tucks his homework in his backpack. Yes. This happens. This happens every day of the school-year with my 11-year-old son, who is bright, funny, and kind, and can’t for the life of him remember to put his completed homework in his freaking backpack. There are dozens of moments in Incredibles 2 like this. They’re small, throwaway character bits that would’ve taken hours or days to animate and voice correctly, and the real thrill of a movie like this–of any Pixar or Miyazaki when they’re clicking–is little moments like these. In Princess Mononoke, for instance, the prince crouches to take a drink from a stream, but before he does so, he loops his bow over his head and under his arm in a completely natural gesture that would be invisible but for its meaningful utility: this guy has spent a lot of time in the woods, drinking from springs and using his bow. It’s biography conveyed almost subliminally in under a second. In Incredibles 2, a breathless Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) calls from a hotel room upon getting “reinstated” as a superhero in this universe where being super is illegal, after which she bursts excitedly into the story of her day while stay-at-home dad Mr. Incredible makes the right noises and turns on the television. The film is wise to cultural/gender issues that can arise when the woman is the breadwinner; to teen girls in daughter Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) efforts to get a boy to notice her (I have a teen girl, too; it’s spot on); and to an American’s unique social programming, which says that anyone can be anything through the power of belief and effort. Not for nothing, the villain of the first film is the manifestation of toxic fandom in the schlubby body of a white guy calling/diagnosing himself “Syndrome.”

Let the Sunshine In (2017)

June 1, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Comedy, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

Un beau soleil intérieur
***½/****
starring Juliette Binoche, Xavier Beauvois, Josiane Balasko, Sandrine Dumas
screenplay by Claire Denis and Christine Angot, based on the book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda Improbable as it might seem for a filmmaker who once wrestled with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s elliptical and uncanny autobiographical essay on his heart transplant, Claire Denis sets her sights on the ostensibly lower-hanging fruit of the romantic comedy in Let the Sunshine In. This play with formal conventions has some precedent, to be sure, in the near-magical coincidences of Vendredi soir and the table-setting musical centrepiece that drives the final act of 35 Shots of Rum. As with L’Intrus, the film also stands as an idiosyncratic adaptation of a French philosopher’s non-narrative work–this time Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, whose musings on how lovers talk to each other aren’t loaded in the characters’ mouths here so much as they are allowed to steep into the ambience like a strong tea. If the genre of happy endings and restored cosmic imbalances seems on paper to be an odd fit for Denis’s predilections for delicate wordless gestures, in practice, Let the Sunshine In is nevertheless as singular as Denis’s ostensibly less categorizable work: a mercurial and rather lovely portrait of a lonely woman’s attempt to replenish herself and secure her future without closing any doors, which is ultimately as open to possibility as its heroine.

The Breakfast Club (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 12, 20181980s, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Teen, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers Necessity is the mother of invention, and The Breakfast Club‘s iconic plot–aped so often it’s become a modern myth, like Rashomon–was designed to ease John Hughes into directing and keep the budget low. The script wasn’t just a formality, though, proof of that being his refusal to cast Jimmie “J.J.” Walker (then in his mid-30s and a frequent passenger on “The Love Boat”) as Bender in exchange for financing from Canadian dentists; he was still able to draw a line between artistic compromise–which had given shape to the material–and selling out. Nor was it some cynical “calling-card,” unlike those one-and-done horror movies career-minded filmmakers like making to get their foot in the door. Yes, The Breakfast Club wound up capitalizing on a bull market for teen fare, but Hughes had an honest interest in telling stories about youth. Proof of that being his screenplay for National Lampoon’s Vacation, doctored by director Harold Ramis to shift the dominant P.O.V. from the kids in the backseat (as in the LAMPOON piece that inspired it, Hughes’s “Vacation ’58”) to the paterfamilias. Through a mixture of savvy and kismet, Hughes had crafted the platonic ideal of a directorial debut for himself, and then something funny happened: the comparatively epic Sixteen Candles became his first feature instead.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

April 9, 20182018, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Germany, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There’s a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson’s whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there’s about to be a joke at Sumo’s expense–Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It’s like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we’re about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there’s not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it’s that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it’s those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film’s depictions of Japanese culture–including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”–are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It’s not “okay,” I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola’s erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don’t think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don’t know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I’m also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [Cinematic Universe Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 5, 20182017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins
written by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw I’ve reached a limit with facility, I think–a point at which things that are professionally executed and entirely meaningless just slide off into a kind of instant nothingness. I’m talking about machine-tooled product, a brand like Kleenex or Kellogg’s, where the only time there’s any awareness of consumption is when the experience of it is unexpected in some way. There’s a reason people see the Virgin Mary in potato chips sometimes. Variation in extruded products is so exceedingly rare that it’s akin to holy visitation: some accidental proof of the supernatural; a glitch in the Matrix. Marvel films are akin now to your daily lunch. You can remember the stray meal. Mostly, it’s something you do knowing you’ve had one yesterday and are likely to have one tomorrow. If you’re like most of us, you could probably eat better.

Before We Vanish (2017)

February 16, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Japan, Road Movie, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Masami Nagasawa, Ryuhei Matsuda, Mahiro Takasugi, Hiroki Hasegawa
screenplay by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka, based on the play by Tomohiro Maekawa
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Angelo Muredda The apocalypse becomes an occasion for everything from learning what makes humans tick to getting to know the distant alien who is your significant other in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s genre-defying twentieth feature Before We Vanish, which might be most firmly characterized as a black comedy if it weren’t so puckishly sunny. A return to form of sorts after Creepy and Daguerreotype, neither of which were without their charms but did feel at times like a master’s idle wheel-spinning, Before We Vanish works best as a high-concept sampler platter of the wildly divergent tones Kurosawa is uncommonly good at mixing up. That isn’t to say the alien-invasion framework and neatly bifurcated dystopian road movie/romcom structure are purely excuses to see how much mileage Kurosawa can get out of his generic indeterminacy. Still, one would be hard-pressed to deny that half the fun lies in taking the film in as the strange sum of its many seemingly ill-fitting parts.

George A. Romero: Between Night and Dawn – Blu-ray Disc

February 13, 20181970s, 2018, Action, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: George A. Romero, Drama, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi

There’s Always Vanilla/The Affair (1972)
*½/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras A-
starring Ray Laine, Judith Streiner (née Ridley), Johanna Lawrence, Richard Ricci
written by R. J. Ricci
directed by George A. Romero

Season of the Witch/George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch/Hungry Wives/Jack’s Wife (1973)
***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Jan White, Ray Laine, Joedda McClain, Bill Thunhurst
written & directed by George A. Romero

The Crazies/Code Name: Trixie (1973)
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar
screenplay by Paul McCollough & George A. Romero
directed by George A. Romero

by Bryant Frazer George A. Romero, one of the unquestioned masters of American horror cinema, never intended to be a horror filmmaker. It’s one of the great ironies in film history. When the Pittsburgh-based writer and director ventured from industrial filmmaking (via his production company, The Latent Image) into features, he made a horror movie not out of any claimed interest in or affinity with the genre, but simply because exploitation pictures were considered the safest investments. And for years after its release, the man who made the epochal Night of the Living Dead (1968)–not just the blueprint for the modern zombie movie, but also a metaphor for U.S. misadventures in Vietnam and a disturbing allegory for inhuman behaviour among the living–was still apologizing for what he perceived as its shortcomings. “There’s so much terrible dialogue, and there are several really poor performances,” Romero said in a 1972 CINEFANTASTIQUE interview conducted by local actor Sam Nicotero, who was playing the role of a sheriff’s deputy in Romero’s then-in-production sci-fi/disaster hybrid, The Crazies. “Technically, the film is not that bad–but, Christ, our commercial work is better than that.”