The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Posted in****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

Bansheesofinisherin

****/****
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

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sdaff22fishstellar

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

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Sdaff22millielieslow

***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

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

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

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 21st 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

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror

Bhff22alljackedup

*/****
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.

The Munsters (2022) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Horror, Streaming

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**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It’s the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes’s “muse,” though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn’t get to on their own. I can’t claim Zombie’s for everyone–hell, Cassavetes ain’t for everyone, either–but he works on a specific wavelength where if you’re hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn’t get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil’s Rejects on, I’ve been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of “The Munsters” (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories–I was excited. I wish it were better.

See How They Run (2022)

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Mystery, Theatrical

Seehowtheyrun

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, David Oyelowo
written by Mark Chappell
directed by Tom George

by Walter Chaw TV director Tom George’s feature debut See How They Run is a Wes Anderson shrine decorated with screenwriter Mark Chappell’s theatre-brat deep cuts, which ultimately just leads one to ask what of it is its own. Set around a murder that takes place at the time of the 100th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, complete with original cast members Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Deila Sim (Pearl Chanda), the whole thing is a twee exercise in medium shots, split screens, and not much else. George and his production designers are gifted at creating clean, period-cozy environments, but all those acres of slick really do is demonstrate how money can buy a talented team of costumers and craftspeople in the pursuit of a recognizable veneer of prestige and quality. What it doesn’t do, at least in this case, is provide the courage and the vision–perhaps it’s experience and wisdom–to tell a story that isn’t all surface pleasures. The real problem is that See How They Run has nothing to say about the world, about people, or, frankly, about Agatha Christie or murder mysteries. It doesn’t even have all that much to say about itself. It’s more the elderly Catskills chic of “Only Murders in the Building” than the genuine social revisionism of Knives Out. It has its opportunities; it mostly ignores them. It’s a choice, and your mileage may vary.

TIFF ’22: I Like Movies

Posted in2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff22ilikemovies

**½/****
starring Isaiah Lehtinen, Krista Bridges, Romina D’Ugo, Percy Hynes White
written and directed by Chandler Levack

by Bill Chambers At the beginning of this pandemic without end, I bought a used camcorder off eBay so that I could digitize the mountains of footage I generated making movies with friends as a teenager. It was a trip down memory lane that confirmed something I’d always suspected and feared: I was a complete tyrant. Make that dick. I was a misfit with control issues stemming from disability, and I was obsessed with movies. Add a video camera to that–at least in the early ’90s, when they were still novel–and you get Napoleon. With his black moptop and squat frame, high-schooler Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) could be a live-action Gene Belcher–but the huge chip on his shoulder and his voluminous clothing sooner bring Ignatius J. Reilly to mind. He’s funny in small doses. Certainly the opening scene of film critic Chandler Levack’s feature debut I Like Movies is so uncanny I could only laugh. Lawrence and his best friend–his only friend–Matt Macarchuck (Percy Hynes White) have made a silly video for class. The teacher, Mr. Olenick (Anand Rajaram), shuts it off after it fades out, and Lawrence protests that he’s skipped the blooper reel and end-credit outtakes. Mr. Olenick asks what their spoof of A Christmas Carol had to do with the assigned topic (“bias in the media”), and Lawrence says, “I just decided I wanted to do something, you know, more personal and from the heart.” A classmate, Lauren (Eden Cupid), sticks up for the video by calling it “cute”–a word that only makes Lawrence apoplectic. Everything that comes out of Lawrence’s mouth here probably came out of mine during my senior year of English, when I made a movie about Elvis faking his death to hide from Satan and called it a book report on The Great Gatsby.

Telluride ’22: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Streaming, Telluride

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Bardo
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
½*/****
starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Hugo Albores, Andrés Almeida, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
written by Nicolás Giacobone & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how tempting it is to just re-post my review of Birdman for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo with a neon “BUT MORE SO” flashing over it, given that I’ve already invested a full three hours in the Mexican auteur’s latest altar to unseemly false modesty. (Oscars four and five, here we come.) This one is another technically dazzling cri de cœur featuring a tortured artist caught in the vicissitudes of a midlife crisis. The stand-in for Iñárritu is Mexican investigative journalist Silverio (a wonderful Daniel Giménez Cacho), who returns to Mexico for the first time in years on the eve of his winning a prestigious award from an American institution. This leads to the usual mid-life stuff: a visit with a dead father and a dying mother; a raucous party where his old friends give him shit for exploiting Mexicans and Mexican culture for gringo fame, power, and approval; a magic-realist consideration of a still-born child, resulting in a repulsive gag played like a circus trick in which a newborn is shoved back into the womb; and the exploration of impostor syndrome, which feels increasingly disingenuous with every enormous set-piece ripped off the Film School Mount Olympus. Bardo is Jay Sherman’s 8½, and knowing it doesn’t excuse it.

Bullet Train (2022)

Posted in2022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Japan, Martial Arts, Theatrical, Thriller

Bullet Train

*/****
starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Zak Olkewicz, based on the book by Kôtarô Isaka
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I have so many thoughts about David Leitch’s Bullet Train, and I don’t think a single one of them coheres with any of the other ones. This is most likely a product of general exhaustion, or a lifetime misspent on excess consumption of media colliding now in middle-age with my becoming somehow the go-to for Amer-Asian-splaining of representational issues in American cinema. Like the whole “whitewashing” thing going on around Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese novel by Kôtarô Isaka, who is pleased people like Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry are in this big-budget Hollywood adaptation because it raises his profile internationally. Sony Pictures, whose parent company is Japanese, has already come out saying the same stupid shit about how much they wanted to honour the Japanese source material by hiring the best actors for the project–who happen to be Not Japanese–while Asian-Americans are rightfully outraged about the same stupid shit because of how much damage this ingrained corporate “wisdom” continues to wreak on the Asian-American community. If we continue to pull on this thread, we find Isaka has stolen the entire premise and execution of his book from Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, who, as we know, have stolen their things from British New Wave gangster flicks on the one hand, Asian cinema on the other–Asian cinema that has its roots in, what, Kurosawa? Whose favourite filmmaker was John Ford? And who was ripped off by Italian guy Sergio Leone, who was ripped off by Sam Peckinpah, who was ripped off by Hong Kong legend John Woo, who was ripped off by everybody for a while there. There’s a scene in Bullet Train where Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry, both playing hitmen, fight each other in tight quarters that is awfully reminiscent of Jackie Chan. Another scene recalls Louis Leterrier, who probably learned it from Jet Li–and neither Chan nor Li is Japanese, of course.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish
written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Tom Gormican

by Bill Chambers There’s a lot I don’t understand about Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent that has nothing to do with its alleged postmodernism. I don’t understand why Nicolas Cage, David Gordon Green, and Demi Moore play “themselves” while Neil Patrick Harris, who plays himself in everything, does not. I don’t understand the point of Green playing himself–that is to say, I don’t understand the point of the director character being David Gordon Green, since a) he’s just an avatar for clout one doesn’t necessarily associate with Green, b) his prior relationship with Cage is never excavated or exploited (they made the not-uninteresting Joe together in 2013), and c) it’s doubtful that enough viewers will know who Green is to justify the casting. I don’t understand Green’s reaction to Cage’s impromptu audition, either, whether his awed “Jesus” is because he’s blown away, appalled, or reacting to an actor–a star–of Cage’s calibre grovelling to the director of The Sitter and Halloween Kills. I don’t understand why the movie spells Nic Cage’s name “Nick Cage”: if it’s to separate onscreen “Nick” from offscreen “Nic,” then why has Nick appeared in all the same stuff as Nic? That “k,” like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent itself, ersatzes Cage. This movie isn’t meta or satire, it’s the Dollar Store version of an American original.

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

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

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

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)

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

Everythingeverywhere

****/****
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)

Posted in2022, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Streaming

Turningred

**/****
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

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

Theseed

**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)

Posted in2021, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, France, Norway, Romance, Sweden, Theatrical

Worstpersonintheworld

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.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

Posted in2013, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama

***½/****
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras C-
4K UHD – Image C+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Jean Dujardin
screenplay by Terence Winter, based on the book by Jordan Belfort
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Angelo Muredda “For us, to live any other way was nuts,” Ray Liotta’s schnook turned gangster Henry Hill explains early on in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. With that, spoken over a montage of permed Italian men in tailored suits gorging themselves at an upscale restaurant, Hill at once launched a wave of lesser, faux-conflicted pictures about the swanky perks and ethical compromises of organized crime, and raised the fundamental moral question of Scorsese’s latest, The Wolf of Wall Street. An unashamedly indulgent, ribald, and formally troubled biopic of Jordan Belfort, this unofficial Goodfellas follow-up likewise revolves around the kind of work that makes living like a pig in shit possible. His kinship to Hill aside, Belfort has had an unusually clear-sailing trajectory to garner the interest of a filmmaker who tends to be drawn to Catholic tales of excess followed by redemptive suffering. Belfort is still a born stockbroker and swindler, despite his working-class origins and federal inquiries and stints in rehab; the fact that he debuted on Wall Street the day of the crash and remains in demand as a guru well after the financial crisis of 2008 seems to give Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter pause, as well the astonishing survival rate of cockroaches should. What better way to make a film about such a man, Scorsese and Winter appear to have concluded, than to structure his story as a Roman orgy?

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

Posted in2021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Licoricepizza

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

Posted in2021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Sdafftime

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

Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Sdaff7days

**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.