Comedy Archives - Page 5 of 76 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Trouble with Harry (1955) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 13, 2022****/****, 1950s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Mildred Natwick, Shirley MacLaine
screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the novel by Jack Trevor Story
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Once I realized the person I’m supposed to suture with in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry is the title character, the middle of Hitchcock’s three dead protagonists (sandwiched between Rebecca‘s Rebecca de Winter and Psycho‘s Mother), the rest of the movie began to make sense to me. Not a literal sense where the characters’ behaviour is reasonable, thus making the narrative intelligible in a rational way, but an absurdist, Lewis Carroll nightmare sense, where language is revealed to be meaningless and unstable enough to destabilize perceptions of time and space as well. The Trouble with Harry casts Vermont in fall as Wonderland aswarm with madness and violence, lodged in a time-loop and peopled by a gallery of hatters and dormice (and even an Alice, completely over-the-rainbow insane) preserved in an autumnal, solipsistic amber of their own deconstructionist, semantic derangement. The closest analogues in movies are Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michel Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore: the former echoing The Trouble with Harry‘s thesis that if reality is defined by language, then reality is as subject to slippage as language; the latter harking back to this film’s snow-globe meta-fiction, where life and death play out its meaningless permutations in a philosophical exercise inside an alien terrarium. The Trouble with Harry would play well in a double-feature with Scorsese’s existentially terrifying After Hours. Godard’s Alphaville, too–a noir about the prison of words where every room contains a “bible,” which, in reality, is a dictionary with telltale words removed (like “poetry” and “love”), thereby eradicating them from the minds of a citizenry enslaved by a machine god.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

March 31, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents’ story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It’s an immigrant story–a typical one, I’ve come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it’s a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn’t approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them–they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to “break” my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don’t know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I’m broken. I’m working on fixing it.

Turning Red (2022)

March 12, 20222022, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Streaming

**/****
screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
directed by Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw There’s a classic ONION article where an Asian San Francisco dry cleaner is picketed for upholding harmful Asian stereotypes that I think about a lot–especially when I wonder what would happen if I ever wrote something about my experiences with a domineering mother and a father who often stood by and watched when I could’ve used a champion. There are so few representations of Asian-Americans in American film that the other edge of that sword of getting a shot at telling a story is, what if the story we tell is merely a (hopefully) more nuanced version of the same old shit? Asian women are slotted into two types by this culture: prostitutes and dragon ladies–the assumption being that the former eventually ages into the latter. They are fetish objects with their own category in porn and shorthands for stentorian parenting and management styles, heavy on the scolding and light on the positive affirmation. These stereotypes arise from WWII GI encounters with brothels in Pacific war zones and a myth of Asian exceptionalism constructed to pit Asians against Blacks in the United States. I have seen white versions of these characters as well (both the whore and the drill sergeant-as-mom), but I have also seen the entire range of human possibility expressed through white faces and bodies in the same films. What I have not seen is a similar courtesy extended to minority characters. One dragon lady in a movie filled with other Asian faces and experiences is fine; it wouldn’t even be unrealistic. When it’s the only characterization, however, it’s a problem that actually gets people murdered. I mean, no one watches Carrie and thinks Mrs. White is a stand-in for all white mothers.

The Seed (2022) – Shudder

March 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

**½/****
starring Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge, Sophie Vavasseur
written and directed by Sam Walker

by Walter Chaw A spirited if familiar body-horror comedy, Sam Walker’s hyphenate debut The Seed showcases a sharp, clean writing/directing aesthetic that doesn’t do anything particularly novel but does the old stuff with verve and economy. Here, a trio of pals decamps to a mod-mansion in the middle of nowhere to watch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower. At least, that’s why “geek-hot” Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) is there. Her influencer buddy Deidre (Lucy Martin) is on hand to livestream the weekend’s events, while yoga instructor Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) wouldn’t say no to a few new clicks for her business, either. The sunbathing, margaritas, mild eruptions of personal grievance, and almost-immediate interruption of cell service are all taken care of in the first 10 minutes. Then it’s on to the uncomfortably-close meteor shower that leads to them wondering if “it’s supposed to do that?” Probably not. Suddenly a thing falls into the pool, starts gooping, is fished out by our heroes (lest Heather’s dad “kill” her), and, of course, resolves itself to be a very stinky alien. “I think God took a shit in your pool, Heather,” observes Diedre, the mean one. The rest of the film is what happens when this divine excrement wakes up.

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

February 2, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, France, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

Verdens verste menneske
***½/****
starring starring Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
written by Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier has had his ear, unerring, pressed against the pulse of sweet melancholia and regret from the very beginning. He followed his first feature, Reprise, a downbeat essay of aspiring writers on the cusp of validation or immolation, with Oslo, August 31st, a jarring and indelible chronicle of one day in the life of a junkie trying for a second chance, maybe too late. Trier’s English-language debut, Louder than Bombs, was about how a father and son remember their dead wife/mother differently, while his Thelma was a supernaturally-tinged coming-of-age film and my favourite movie of that year. Now comes this intense character study of the anxious generation, The Worst Person in the World. These films share an interest in people at a crossroads and forced to evolve. If I have a beef with Trier, it’s that his endings of late have tended towards, if not tidiness exactly, at least a neatness not befitting his characters and their messy lives. It’s less a failing of his than a failing of mine. I think what they do, though, these endings that feel like endings, is push his films a little away from realism and a little towards fable. The Worst Person in the World, accordingly, is a film through which it appears that Trier–32 at the time of Reprise, 47 now–is wrestling with what it means to be 30 in 2021 after providing such immediate and raw social landscapes in his early work. I wonder if fable is the only way to properly contextualize the young as we push into and past middle age. Maybe it would feel unseemly to pretend otherwise.

Licorice Pizza (2021) + Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

November 22, 20212021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

LICORICE PIZZA
*½/****
starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

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

by Walter Chaw In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, John Michael Higgins plays real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick, proprietor of “The Mikado.” Frick is married to a severe and disapproving Japanese woman (Yumi Mizui) who apparently doesn’t speak any English, although she seems to understand it fluently. She certainly understands her husband, who doesn’t speak Japanese but does speak English, when he’s speaking it to her, in a cartoonish Asian accent. This is perhaps a commentary on how backwards everyone was in 1973, but Licorice Pizza is not otherwise a satire, so what the fuck is going on here? Is PTA reserving the barbed edge of his keen sociological blade exclusively to excavate anti-Asian depictions in film and nowhere else? Based on Hong Chau’s brief but memorable turn in Inherent Vice as a tough hooker (oops) who tries to warn the idiot hero of danger, there’s reason to hope. Yet if Frick is meant to be a satire of how white men are racist towards Asians in general and Asian women in particular… How? Just by the fact of him? In his second scene, he shows up with a different wife (Megumi Anjo), explaining how his first wife has left him and this is the new Mrs. Frick. The joke is either that Frick is a fetishist, or that all Asians look alike.

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

SDAFF ’21: 7 Days

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Gita Reddy, Zenobia Shroff
written by Roshan Sethi & Karan Soni
directed by Roshan Sethi

by Walter Chaw Roshan Sethi’s 7 Days is a charmer. It opens like When Harry Met Sally… with interviews of real couples at different stages in their relationships talking about how they met and how they’re getting along. In this incarnation, the couples all appear to be desi, and the common theme that binds them is their arranged marriages. They set the stage for this story of traditional cultures trying to maintain in the diaspora, of how a young generation of desi struggle with the pull of tradition versus the siren’s call of assimilation. I don’t use this metaphor loosely: assimilation is a kind of death. If it results in rebirth, so be it, but a thing dies in the process of that renaissance and I’m no longer certain that the transformation is necessary or, if it’s necessary, worth it. The rewards fall far short of the price one pays for surrendering something so valuable as a cultural lineage, an identity beyond the one provided by an adopted culture that would prefer you edgeless and easy to compartmentalize.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

September 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on his stage play with songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
directed by Stephen Chbosky

by Walter Chaw Dear Evan Hansen is the Canadian-girlfriend grift, emerging from insecurity and good intentions–that mythological girl from a place far enough away for high-school kids that it might as well be Narnia or Middle-Earth, whose phantom existence affirms you are not as pathetic and alone as you really are. And when your Canadian girlfriend dies by house-fire or moose misadventure, perhaps there’s a vein of pathos to be mined there for whatever profit grief allows. It’s the illusion of depth for an immature, troubled, frightened kid, common enough that the “Canadian girlfriend” has entered the pantheon of urban fairytales. How ’bout if Dear Evan Hansen had been about the social pressures that harangue Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) into exploiting the death of a deeply unbalanced and complete stranger instead of how Evan Hansen’s own terminal thoughts and attempted suicide forgive his sociopathic manipulation of a grieving family and school community? Aye, there’s a movie for you–the one where Evan Hansen is a victim and not the hero, and the bad guy is not the truth of his unforgivable deception being discovered, but the overwhelming stricture to conform that weighs especially heavy on adolescents. The sneakiest thing about Dear Even Hansen is that at the end of it all, it’s not actually okay that Evan is an outcast. The premise itself is the bully.

TIFF ’21: The Good House

September 20, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney
screenplay by Thomas Bezucha and Maya Forbes & Wally Wolodarsky, based on the novel by Ann Leary
directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky

by Bill Chambers Earlier this year, I revisited 1995's Copycat, in which Sigourney Weaver plays an agoraphobic criminologist assisting the police in their hunt for a serial killer who arranges tableaux in tribute to famous murderers of the past. It's the sort of B-movie in A dress they don't make anymore, an exuberantly tasteless piece of crackerjack filmmaking that made me wistful for medium-budget, middle-class movie-movies that exist for their own sake. But, perhaps because her most iconic roles are so heroic (this is a woman neither gorillas, nor xenomorphs, nor Bill Murray himself could cow), Weaver's brand doesn't bend towards powerlessness without showing the strain. I thought then and still think that Weaver was miscast as a woman who hyperventilates into paper bags in Copycat. Similarly, her character's reluctance to admit she has a problem with alcohol in The Good House seems as much informed by pride and social stigmas as it does by certain firewalls in Weaver's persona. Hildy Good (Weaver) is a real-estate agent in Wendover, Massachusetts (actually Nova Scotia). It's a small coastal town and she worries what her neighbours think of her, especially considering word-of-mouth affects her livelihood. Maybe that's why she's had her struggles with booze, because of the pressure of maintaining a reputation. Booze, of course, never helped anybody's reputation.

Telluride ’21: The French Dispatch

September 5, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
**/****
starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw Out of three sections, not including a framing story, there is one that gets what it’s after with the soul of wit and a tug of the heart along the way. It’s the middle section, the one concerning a brilliant modern artist incarcerated in a French prison for dismembering two bartenders who falls in love with one of his jailers. He is Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his eternal Beatrice, his jack-booted muse, is Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the pas de deux they perform together encapsulates a range of lovely nuance that crystallizes what it is that Wes Anderson does very well, if only occasionally these days, in brief flashes glimpsed between the metric ton of artifice and affectation. For many, the chantilly is the point of Anderson–those gaudy elements that make him one of the most satirized filmmakers of his generation. For me, and up through The Darjeeling Limited, what I liked best about Wes Anderson was his sometimes shockingly effective grappling with absent fathers and broken families. His twee quirk used to be a delivery system for emotional squalls. Now, if those crescendos are there, they’re gasping for air.

Almost Famous (2000) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

August 18, 20212000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

Almost Famous **½/****
Untitled ***/****
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Bryant Frazer Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s fondly remembered period piece about a bygone era of rock stars and the various satellites in their orbit, is a bit of a relic these days. Even on its release in 2000, when it was almost 30 years removed from its subject matter, Almost Famous was a notably uncritical celebration of a moment in 20^th-century music history. Another 20 years on, having centred the phallic sexual and creative powers of a white guy with a guitar, Almost Famous is increasingly disconnected from the prevailing pop and hip-hop zeitgeist, and the film feels even more like cultural hagiography. On the other hand, it is a hell of a story. The fundamentals are autobiographical: Cameron Crowe really was a 15-year-old whiz kid who earned early graduation from high school; he really did seek career advice from legendary rock-and-roll critic Lester Bangs; and he really landed a ROLLING STONE assignment to hit the road with a group of next-big-thing cock-rockers. The story, as Crowe retells it here, has intrepid young journo William Miller (a fresh-faced Patrick Fugit) on assignment with the fictional rock group Stillwater–dealing with celebrity egos, yearning for the teenaged groupies who sprinkle their figurative fairy dust around a series of interchangeable ballrooms, basketball arenas, and hotel suites, and checking in with a protective mother (Frances McDormand) who can only peer helplessly into her son’s wonderland from her world outside the circus tent. Finally, William meets with his editors back at HQ to bang out a chunk of blistering reportage that will lay bare the raw emotional state of a band on tour and cement his status as a rock journalist. What could go wrong?

Fantasia Festival ’21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

August 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn’t have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It’s so good because it’s so…simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that’s kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Hotel Poseidon

August 15, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director’s fever dream, Stef Lernous’s Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro’s City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we’re all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It’s not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch’s work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious–a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

August 8, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Viola Davis
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is weird. It’s explosively, hilariously gory, profane, ridiculous, and, best of all, lawless. As much as I love Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the darkness–the grittiness–he brought to the DC Universe has proven difficult to shake due to its commercial success. In contrast, The Suicide Squad looks and acts a lot like the Adam West “Batman” TV series, a piece fully embracing the elasticity of both its mediums and, though it seems silly to say, one bracingly unafraid of literal colour. I also felt this way about Gunn’s still-dour-but-colorful-by-MCU-standards Guardians of the Galaxy—but this film feels very much like something, from character and production design down to the choice of members for the titular squad, allowed to be whatever it was going to be, damn the torpedoes. Have I mentioned that it’s weird? It’s exquisitely strange, and not just because of the obvious ways in which things are strange, but because it says the bad guys are the colonial-/meddling-minded United States, the military-industrial complex is reliant on the enslavement of the carceral state, and the best test of manhood is not facility with firearms and sociopathy. A billion-dollar IP that isn’t trying to skate the middle line of absolute, frictionless equivocation? Weird, right?

Howard the Duck (1986) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

August 3, 20211980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

July 29, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Michael Green and Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw For a film based on a theme-park attraction without a point of view or anything to say, Jungle Cruise is as good as it could possibly be, i.e.: fine. It reaps whatever benefits one could from the star power of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt without giving them something to do, and it seems to belong to the Aguirre, The Wrath of God cinematic universe, which is, you know, unexpected. There’s a moment somewhere in the middle of it where Blunt’s character, Lily, asks Johnson’s Frank a personal question and then listens. She’s an actor of tremendous empathy and clarity, and although, in these moments after finishing the movie, I can’t for the life of me remember what they were talking about, I do recall thinking how nice it would be if Blunt got more roles in which she might play a human being. For now, she’s a plucky scientist two years into WWI who is denied admission into stuffy scientific societies because she’s not only a woman but a woman who wears pants. What Lily wants to do most is find a mythical tree blossom in the Amazon that bestows eternal life, making Jungle Cruise a part of The Fountain‘s cinematic universe, too, which is likewise unexpected. The person she hires to help her is Frank, of course, and the bad guy who wants the blossom but for nefarious reasons is German Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons). Oh, the other bad guy who wants the blossom is Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), a centuries-old conquistador doomed to jungle purgatory. It doesn’t matter.

Riders of Justice (2020)

July 9, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical

Retfærdighedens ryttere
***/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Roland Møller
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Walter Chaw Dogma 95 vet Anders Thomas Jensen has a particular interest in oddness. Characters, especially, in Jensen’s films as writer and director are given to sometimes-extravagant eccentricity, fueled by traumas Jensen declines to sanitize that are often exacerbated by intelligence worn as an unwelcome birth defect. Consider the menagerie at the centre of Jensen’s Men & Chicken, an updating in a way of The Island of Dr. Moreau reconfigured as a “light” family drama in the Danish countryside. Mads Mikkelson stars in that one, too, playing a chronic masturbator who finds out that his father has been splicing his own sperm with animal sperm in an attempt to… Well, look, it’s an interesting piece about social norms and how an inability to assimilate culturally leads to these islands of misfit boys. Jensen is interested, specifically and obsessively, in what happens when physical and mental mutations stunt emotional and social development. Though no one would want the crown, he is the poet laureate of the incel state.

Luca (2021)

June 16, 20212021, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa’s Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called “Porto Rosso” in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki’s Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca‘s message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn’t, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they’re afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It’s tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it’s clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It’s there if you want it.