Comedy Archives - Page 4 of 77 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

May 20, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Romance, Streaming, Thriller, ZERO STARS

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

May 6, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Finland, Horror, Theatrical, VOD, War

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn’t an embarrassing high concept. His years on “Robot Chicken” and “Moral Orel” demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far–between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield–McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter (“splat-stick?”) flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There’s a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

April 30, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan Din, Vicki Pepperdine
written by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Bill Chambers Loosely based on star and co-scenarist Channing Tatum’s exotic-dancer past, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike was a pleasant surprise for treating the world of male strippers seriously–if finally too seriously, as the buoyant first half gives way to a heavy-handed moralizing reminiscent of Soderbergh’s Traffic in the second. Sex work in Magic Mike is something to transcend through drugs or a trade skill. Gregory Jacobs’s terrific follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, washed away the Afterschool Special aftertaste of the original by taking shame out of the equation: A road movie that finds Mike and the remaining “Kings of Tampa” travelling to a stripping convention in Myrtle Beach, it’s a celebration of a certain esprit de corps. Despite the instantly iconic scene of Joe Manganiello dancing to “I Want It That Way” for the amusement of a supermarket cashier, Magic Mike XXL wasn’t zeitgeist-defining like its predecessor, but it nails the hangout-movie vibe Soderbergh was chasing in his Ocean’s sequels, and will no doubt endure as the Godfather Part II/Empire Strikes Back of Magic Mike movies. And what will Magic Mike’s Last Dance go down as? Something like the Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo of the trilogy is my best guess. I have no idea if Soderbergh’s longtime AD Jacobs was merely a figurehead on Magic Mike XXL, which was made in that weird period of Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking (though he still served as the picture’s cinematographer), but in returning to the helm for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Soderbergh directs like someone who’s been shown where the g-spot is and can’t for the life of him remember, so he’ll have to bluff his way through it.

Showing Up (2023)

April 14, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro, Judd Hirsch
written by Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Angelo Muredda “You’re ruining my work day,” Michelle Williams’s sculptor Lizzy whines to her cat Ricky early in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, which might be the most incisive portrait of the artist working from home to date. Its mundane, thoroughly lived-in depiction of Lizzy’s domestic puttering among companions, both animal and human, under the clouds of an upcoming show, a slow-burning family crisis, and a few weeks without hot water, hits particularly hard post-COVID, even as Reichardt takes pains to emphasize the comforts and support that Lizzy enjoys as compared to the more precarious outsiders in films such as Wendy and Lucy. Originally co-imagined with frequent collaborator Jon Raymond as a film about post-impressionist Canadian artist Emily Carr becoming a landlord to pay the bills (before Reichardt realized Carr’s outsized fame in Canada was roughly equivalent to Andy Warhol’s in the U.S.), Showing Up has been retooled as, improbably, a contemporary comedy–a mordantly funny look at the myriad push-pull interactions between art, commerce, and communal obligation. That tangled mess, Reichardt’s assured film suggests, makes it a wonder that any art gets made at all, let alone that anyone shows up to honour either the work or the people who make it.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

April 8, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Iceland, Sports, Theatrical, UK, VOD

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron’s pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill–a personal Chekhov’s Gun, if you will. It’ll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly’s Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne’er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend’s sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Smoking Causes Coughing

March 29, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Fumer fait tousser
***/****
starring Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s eleventh film Smoking Causes Coughing is an anthology picture organized around a framing device in which five costumed idiots forced to go on a team-building retreat tell each other horrifying tales around a campfire. I’ve been decidedly lukewarm on Dupieux’s films. They’re the very definition of an acquired taste, and I suspect they’re hit-or-miss even if you’re dialled into their frequency. His best-known film is probably Rubber (2010), a creature-feature about a car tire that causes folks’ heads to explode using “telepathy.” That’s the punchline to the long setup of a tire rolling around to tense music, which Dupieux punctuates with dialogue that’s knowingly campy, dedicatedly stupid, and ramped up with vein-bulging sincerity. It’s the kind of conceit that attracts viewers who like to laugh at movies. I think Dupieux’s sense of humour relies a lot on exaggeration and repetition, with the former landing like grossly performative sarcasm and the latter like the most irritating person you know milking a joke until the doggedness itself becomes the joke. For the most part, Dupieux’s movies don’t think much of the genres they’re mocking and, by extension, they don’t think much of the audiences for them, either.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Sick of Myself

March 25, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Norway, Sweden

Syk pike
***½/****
starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther, Fanny Vaager
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Effectively the Ruben Östlund film that got away, Kristoffer Borgli’s acerbic Sick of Myself (and I can’t say the title without singing it to the tune of the Matthew Sweet anthem of self-loathing) skewers the cult of victimhood that runs parallel to any progressive social awakening, muddying the waters to such an extent that the language of tolerance becomes weaponized, and true gains come clouded with apologies and equivocations. One step forward, 80 years’ worth of steps back. A scene late in Sick of Myself between a poisonous narcissist and the friend and journalist trying to make sense of it all has the malignant party saying they’re the real victim of their own absurd machinations, because, given a choice, no one would ask to be a psychopath. It’s funny because it’s familiar: how self-pity is the easier sensation to bear over shame. And it’s familiar because there isn’t even anything like the illusion of accountability left in this world. The worst of us, given an unprecedented platform to do harm, will never admit to anything like fault or suffer anything like consequences.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

March 4, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ray Liotta
screenplay by Jimmy Warden
directed by Elizabeth Banks

by Walter Chaw The first 45 minutes or so of Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear deliver everything the title promises: A bear, behaving erratically, mauls European hikers and precocious children daring one another to eat a tablespoon of what Jay McInerney would know as Bolivian Marching Powder. The last 45 minutes are an enervated slog heavy on convention and eager to pull all the punches the film was landing with malicious glee in the first half. It’s almost as though a switch is flipped right around the time a pair of hapless paramedics, Beth (Kahyun Kim) and Tom (meme-meister Scott Seiss), stumble on a terrible scene before becoming the centrepiece of another–almost as though a decision was made to suddenly try to carve out a coherent three-act structure from agreeably bloody chaos. To what end? To make a play for awards-season consideration? To appease some imaginary audience coming to Cocaine Bear for an adventure story with not one happy ending but two? The only audience it’s ultimately pandering to are non-creatives with a say in the process, congratulating themselves for forcing a movie about a bear doing murders while tweaking on nose candy to wrap up its various threads in tidy little bows. What a shame.

The Fabelmans (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 12, 20232022, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there’s a chance he’ll destroy his family because of it–showing things that aren’t for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there’s a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he’s sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too…uh, too, because it’s ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy’s bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans than there are dialogues–more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don’t know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.

Somebody I Used to Know (2023)

February 9, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey Clemons, Julie Hagerty
written by Dave Franco & Alison Brie
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw My Best Friend’s Wedding is vile, happy-go-fucky bullshit that polishes the sociopathic behaviour of a solipsistic narcissist to a patently plastic Julia Roberts sheen. It stinks of flop sweat and forced artificiality, and it made somewhere in the neighbourhood of a kabillion dollars because it traffics in exactly the sort of soft-racist, misogynistic horsepucky favoured by a demographic that likes blended drinks and doing mall walks. About 30 minutes into Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know, someone confronts someone else by saying, “You’re not doing some My Best Friend’s Wedding thing, are you?” And, well, she is. Credit for knowing just how unbearable your film is, I guess, this comedy of cringe where “naturalism” means ending every statement as a question and the main character is a pastiche of insufferable tropes who decorated her childhood room with a Sleater-Kinney poster, a pen-drawing of Joni Mitchell, and the “Have a Nice Daze” Dazed and Confused and American Movie teaser posters. Get it? That real clear picture of who this person is and who the people sketching her are? The song over the closing credits is Third-Eye Blind‘s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Got it now? There’s a Chance the Rapper sighting, too. Run. Fucking save yourself.

Shotgun Wedding (2023) + You People (2023)

January 31, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming

SHOTGUN WEDDING
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz
written by Mark Hammer
directed by Jason Moore

YOU PEOPLE
***/****
starring Jonah Hill, Lauren London, David Duchovny, Eddie Murphy
written by Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris
directed by Kenya Barris

by Walter Chaw Jennifer Coolidge, 61, plays the mother of 50-year-old Josh Duhamel in Jason “Pitch Perfect” Moore’s abominable-in-pretty-much-every-conceivable-way Shotgun Wedding, and her being 11 when she had him isn’t even the worst of it. Honestly, this is the kind of movie where it would’ve been funny if they’d made a joke out of that somehow (like maybe how Steve Coulter, who plays his dad, would’ve been 12), and Coolidge has exactly the befuddled, oversexed MILF persona to pull it off. I don’t know, I didn’t write this shit. Coolidge is Carol and Coulter is Larry. Their son Tom is a total loser recently released from a minor-league baseball team, which only makes sense because he’s on the AARP mailing list. Has he been trying to make it to “the show” for 30 years? One of these Crash Davis things, I guess. Just kidding: Crash was 33; can Tom even tie his own shoes anymore without getting winded? Because I’m turning 50 this year, and let me tell you, I cannot. Tom is marrying Darcy (Jennifer Lopez), who spends every other sentence mobbing Tom for each of his groomzilla decisions–decisions he has to make, because Darcy is disengaged from the entire process and resents having to have a wedding at all, since one of the first things she said to him when they started dating was that she didn’t want a fancy wedding. Tom will eventually apologize for not listening to her, but if the intent is to make this about Tom learning to be a better partner, I must confess I would stop listening to someone as passive-aggressive and monstrously belittling as Darcy. Maybe Tom has a humiliation kink. That would explain why he played minor-league baseball for 30 years and probably votes Republican. It’s not my place to judge that, I’m just observing it.

A Man Called Otto (2022)

January 5, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Sweden, Theatrical

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mariana Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Mike Birbiglia
screenplay by David Magee, based on the novel A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and the film A Man Called Ove written by Hannes Holm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw “Get out of here while you can,” the old man snarls to the stray cat. “I’m not your friend.” But of course he will befriend the kitty, because you don’t introduce a stray cat at the beginning of a manipulative piece of happy-go-fuckery like A Man Called Otto without it becoming one catalyst of many for the objectionable curmudgeon’s development of a renewed reason for living. You could say that every character in A Man Called Otto is similarly a collection of adorable quirks and bottomless patience designed exclusively for the redemptive salvation of our man Otto. Otto, who is Tom Hanks’s second shot at playing someone on the neurodivergent spectrum, this time landing somewhere just south of the elder Paul Newman, in the neighbourhood of Walter Matthau (at the corner of Richard Russo and Garrison Keillor). On his first date with his dead wife (Rachel Keller), a scene played in flashback by Hanks’s other other son, Truman (who is less like a cross between Hanks and Rita Wilson than between Colin and Chet), Otto’s asked what he’s passionate about and says he’s interested in machines and how things work. Forced into early retirement as the picture opens, he’s a dedicated engineer obsessed with details–yet he doesn’t understand that if he wants to hang himself from a rope looped through a ring hook in his living room, he needs to use a support beam in the ceiling or else what you know is going to happen will happen. Then he blames the hook. I know it’s a Better Off Dead gag, but it’s also inconsistent writing meant to extort a response like Thomas Newman’s emotive/emetic tongue bath of a score. If you turned the concept of “insincere pathos” into a music box, this is the noise it would make. It conjures the images of teddy bears finding a baby next to a river. Look, if Thomas Kinkade paintings came with soundtracks…

White Noise (2022)

December 29, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, UK

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda “Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip,” says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo’s satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo’s protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store’s capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that’s hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called “airborne toxic event” that’s blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store’s unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo’s novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

Babylon (2022)

December 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw If it were only vile, only repulsive, it still would have been a disaster lacking insight and honesty, but at least it wouldn’t also be afflicted with bathetic false modesty wet down with spasms of cheap sentiment. Damien Chazelle’s back to his old tricks, in other words, with Babylon, a “love letter” to the end of the silent era in Hollywood presented with a child’s understanding of history, obviously, not to mention human relationships, aspirations, behaviour, everything. It’s a stroke fantasy made by a 13-year-old boy, meaning it’s soaked in excreta without much evidence of anything like experience animating it–the movie made by the antagonist of Monty Python’s “Nudge Nudge” bit, who, at the end of 10 minutes of naughty entendre, wonders rapturously what it might be like to touch a woman’s breast. I loved Chazelle’s last film, First Man: Sober and introspective, it found the soulfulness in an engineer’s deadening grief over the loss of a child. His other three films, this one included, are a trilogy of desperation to be taken seriously as a great auteur, a great historian of jazz and Hollywood, and an artiste of the first calibre. Alas, he doesn’t know the difference between being celebrated for his worst instincts versus fighting for his best ones. At the end of Whiplash, La La Land, and now Babylon, the only thing he’s successfully communicated is that he’s seen Singin’ in the Rain, if not entirely understood it. It should take less than eight hours to accomplish that.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 20, 20221980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, John Hughes

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Commentary B
starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn
written by John Hughes
directed by Jeremiah Chechik

Updated to correct an embarrassing blunder on 12/28/2022.-Ed.

by Bill Chambers After turning in a subpar first draft of National Lampoon’s European Vacation and ghosting the production thereafter, John Hughes made an unexpected return to the franchise by writing and producing National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, loosely basing his screenplay, like that of the first …Vacation, on one of his short stories for NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. Both “Vacation ’58” and “Christmas ’59” are written as a childhood reminiscence and get their humour from the discordant pairing of morbid memories and misty-eyed prose. (Think Jean Shepherd in charge of the police blotter.) There is no Clark Griswold per se in these stories, only a hazy father figure coming unglued. As a result, Hughes butted heads with director Harold Ramis on the original, since Ramis was making a Chevy Chase vehicle, not a coming-of-age flick. By Christmas Vacation, Hughes was at a different place in his personal and professional lives, raising children and turning mogul, and the film finds him identifying with the patriarch almost to the exclusion of the kid characters. His screenplay, in fact, reclaims Clark from Amy Heckerling’s aimless and conceptually fuzzy European Vacation, seizing on the pressure cooker of the holiday season as a poignant trigger for Clark’s compulsive need to contrive Kodak, nay, Hallmark moments.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

December 3, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kelly, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw I lost a friend this year. Not to death but to no longer having anything of value to offer him, what with time getting short. I understand that. It’s happened before for different reasons, and while it’s tempting to say it’s not my fault, sure, it’s my fault. All you need to love in this world unconditionally are your kids, and, well, the last time my late parents told me they loved me, I was nine years old. I remember that because every few years, I’ve had reason to wonder when it stopped and what exactly I did to deserve it. The myth of family is just that; I think there’s a reason people like me build their own families. The only thing unconditional is the love a dog has for you, and people abuse dogs all the time. I have friends who are enervating to me as well, and I wonder if my loyalty to them has everything to do with knowing the pain of being left by the side of the road by the people I have loved–and not wanting to inflict that on anyone else. The fashion of the moment speaks of this as “ending the cycle” of abuse. I’m drawn to artists like Kendrick Lamar who use poetry and what appears to be an extraordinary vulnerability to lay bare their struggles. Even as I write this, I’m noticing the pain I have in the middle knuckle of the third finger on my left hand. I’ve put down millions of words in the past 20 years, going through multiple keyboards and laptops in that time. I was driven by an obsession not to be forgotten, although I’m losing track of why that matters. The longer I go, the more it seems a blessing to slip beneath the surface, and then it’s done. I have a heaviness in my chest sometimes that feels like a stone, worn smooth and round, sitting right there on my sternum. Time is getting short for me. Some days it feels a lot shorter than others. I wonder how small the iris of my perception will become as the possibility of works I’ll complete dwindles to not one more. That’s it, then someone else closes the cover of your last notebook.

SDAFF ’22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

November 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let’s say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan’s House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun–whose name means “Mr. Fish,” leading me to suspect it’s maybe not his real name–is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan’s peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he’s well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF ’22: Millie Lies Low

November 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill’s hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It’s an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She’s Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane’s on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can’t get back on without a new ticket she can’t afford. Unable to accept that she’s made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she’s made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she’s left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral–all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

October 25, 2022****/****, 1980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg, Teen, Thriller, Vampire

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21^st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms

October 19, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror

*/****
starring Phillip Andre Botello, Sammy Arechar, Betsey Brown, Trevor Dawkins
written and directed by Alex Phillips

by Walter Chaw A sub-, sub-, sub-genre of exploitation flicks–stuff like Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler–has cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in mainstream-adjacent spaces where it appears the only aim, or goal, is provocation. I watched The Greasy Strangler with irritation and impatience until a scene in which two characters shrieked “potato chips” at each other in incomprehensible accents broke me into helpless hysterics. I don’t know if it’s funny or its full-throated dedication to battering all defenses finally just worked. For what it’s worth, the movie went back to being irritating and trying for me almost immediately. I have a different response to Jackass, a chaos agent provocateur that ultimately strikes at the heart of some real and touching truths about not necessarily healthy male relationships, but possibly the healthiest most male relationships are allowed to be. Nevertheless, there are similarities between stuff like it and The Greasy Strangler. Both proceed because there must be something that is next, not because there is a narrative that demands it or characters with motivations leading organically to another sequence. In that way, these films are not unlike life in all its arbitrary bullshit and oft-times malignant-seeming causes and potentially tragicomic effects. Exaggerating random vicissitudes as filtered through sentient existence could conceivably be considered satire at best or, you know, knowledge of some kind that might prove useful in providing perspective to those looking for meaning and structure in the universe. What I have trouble with is how often this stuff feels like the parts of Kevin Smith films–which is all of Kevin Smith’s films now–that are puerile and embarrassing. Feature-length shit-monsters from Dogma.