Comedy Archives - Page 7 of 77 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Promising Young Woman (2020)

December 14, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell’s feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade’s Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it’s spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it’s rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

Coming to America (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

December 10, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Eddie Murphy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, John Amos
screenplay by David Sheffield & Barry W. Blaustein
directed by John Landis

by Bill Chambers When I interviewed the great documentarian Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame, he asked me if I’d ever seen Coming to America, and I didn’t know quite how to answer him. There was a time, during my adolescence in the mid-to-late ’80s, when not seeing the latest Eddie Murphy movie would’ve put a serious crimp in my social life–when the extremely homophobic routines of Eddie Murphy “Delirious” (a.k.a. Eddie Murphy: Comedian, which my friend Joel gave to me on vinyl for my 12^th birthday) constituted the lingua franca of my peers, for worse or for worse. This was also the age of PayTV and home video, when it was not uncommon to watch a film you liked over and over again until you practically fused with it; I liked Coming to America. I liked it, and lots of kids my age liked it, I suspect, because it made us feel like adults with its titties and swears but basically coddled us with a plot out of Disney and a laid-back vibe to match. I’d soured on it in the years since, partly out of fear it was a low-key minstrel show. I’m still not sure that it isn’t, but anyway, in answer to James’s question, I said “yep.”

Love and Monsters (2020) – VOD

December 7, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, VOD

***/****
starring Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Dan Ewing, Michael Rooker
screenplay by Brian Duffield & Matthew Robinson
directed by Michael Matthews

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie someone like Joe Dante might have made for Roger Corman once upon a time, Love and Monsters, Michael Matthews’s follow-up to his Five Fingers for Marseilles, is a joyfully, unashamedly silly American kaiju modest in its ambitions and occasionally poignant for that modesty. In Love and Monsters, a broad (very broad) updating of L Q. Jones’s deep-cut cult movie of Harlan’s Ellison “A Boy and His Dog,” a lovable schlub named Joel (Dylan O’Brien) is ensconced in a bunker with a handful of other survivors thanks to a plague of monsters that has obliterated 95% of the human population. It’s possible to go deep on how these monsters are the result of “chemicals” raining down on the planet because emergency rockets were fired into a looming asteroid, and how if this is a quarantine allegory, its ultimate message that you should leave quarantine is unfortunately-timed, but the picture is too good-natured to deserve much opprobrium for misreading the room.

Catching Up (2020) – VOD

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Romance, VOD

**½/****
starring Bill Crossland, Francesca Carpanini, Isabella Pisacane, Johnathan Fernandez
screenplay by Bill Crossland & Patrick Morris
directed by Bill Crossland

by Angelo Muredda Disabled men finally get that ’80s-tinged coming-of-age dramedy they ordered in Bill Crossland’s Catching Up, which feels at once like a hyper-niche genre exercise and something a bit too user-friendly for the masses to really say what it needs to say about its subjects’ sexual hang-ups. Appropriately, given the light representational twist of the premise and the title’s suggestion of something overdue, the film’s protagonist, Frank (played by Crossland, who also co-wrote the script with Patrick Morris and co-conceived the project with Mindy Beach), isn’t a high-school student on the verge of adulthood but rather a teacher, albeit one who still lives at home with his parents, who relate to him as both caretakers and friends. Along with Crossland’s uniquely specific casting–to the chagrin of this disabled writer and probably the filmmaker, too, it’s still a novelty to see a physically disabled actor playing a physically disabled character, let alone one they’ve written and directed–that quirk in the narrative trajectory makes Catching Up pretty novel despite its less convincing efforts to court a wider audience.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020)

November 13, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finnernan, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see Freaky in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

The Goonies (1985) + Beetlejuice (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 6, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Family, Fantasy, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p versions

THE GOONIES
*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Richard Donner

Beetle Juice
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A-
starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren
directed by Tim Burton

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw and Alex Jackson already covered The Goonies and Beetlejuice (hereafter Beetle Juice), respectively, for our humble little website, I feel obliged to say something about these films before moving on to the technical portion of this review. Firstly, I don’t think I’d seen The Goonies from beginning to end since the ’80s, and it took me a week to get through it this time. I summed up the experience on Letterboxd as “like being buried alive in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese,” which was equally true no matter where I started from; The Goonies is just so screamy. To a certain extent, that’s verisimilitude–this is, after all, a movie about a gaggle of teens and preteens on a treasure hunt, hopped up on sugar, hormones, and the fantasy of instant wealth. But it isn’t merely that they’re rambunctious–they’re also mean.

TIFF ’20 ‘Quibi’: Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

September 22, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some ‘quick bites’ in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it’s true that there’s no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that’s jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues–Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)–while out celebrating Nikolaj’s 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy’s soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means “binge-drinking”) is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers–but, y’know, it’s booze, and the four men eventually can’t resist drinking past the point of “ignition,” leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon’s credo from James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know: “Don’t drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better.” Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that’s 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

TIFF ’20: New Order + Fauna

September 18, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Thriller, TIFF

Nuevo orden
*½/****
starring Naian Gonzaléz Norvind, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Mónica Del Carmen, Sebastian Silveti
written and directed by Michel Franco

FAUNA
***½/****
starring Francisco Barreiro, Luisa Pardo, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez
directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Bill Chambers I’d heard that Michel Franco’s New Order was the new Parasite but from the rich people’s P.O.V., and I’m here to tell you that Parasite from the rich people’s P.O.V. wouldn’t be Parasite. Still, I did find the basic premise of New Order quite promising as social commentary: In Mexico City, mounting class resentments spark an uprising against aristocracy on the same day a local heiress is due to be married. I imagined a modern-day storming of the Bastille, but this is a film, for better or worse, of 21^st-century ideas, and it introduces a wrinkle into our eat-the-rich fantasies–military intervention–that becomes a tsunami. An elderly man (Eligio Meléndez) who used to work for the family of the bride, Marianne (Naian Gonzaléz Norvind), shows up at the wedding claiming his sick wife needs money for an operation. (If you watch HBO’s “Succession”, you know the kind of territory he’s wading into.) The mother (Lisa Owen) wants to help but is cowed by the guests’ stinginess, while Marianne’s brother (Diego Boneta) tips him like a bellhop and expects him to shoo. They’re unwittingly justifying the fury of the vandals and looters advancing on their home; only Marianne is truly sympathetic to the old man’s plight, going so far as to leave her own wedding (with one of the help in tow) to pick up his wife and drive her to the hospital. But during her absence, the military hatches a diabolical plan to manipulate the situation so as to solidify the caste system rather than see it evolve: they will abduct any wealthy citizens who’ve strayed from home–mostly the younger set, which leads to a lot of youthful flesh being exploitatively displayed as hostages are stripped naked and hosed down–and ransom them back to family members, pinning the responsibility for these kidnappings on the protestors.

TIFF ’20: Shiva Baby

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Rachel Sennott, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron
written and directed by Emma Seligman

by Angelo Muredda Hell is other people waiting in line outside the bathroom at a function where you hate everyone in Emma Seligman's cringe comedy debut Shiva Baby, which impressively sustains something of the fever pitch of the Satanic ritual in the Castevets' apartment from Rosemary's Baby for most of its 77-minute runtime. More proof of concept for future films than a proper knockout, Shiva Baby is at least a nimble showcase for star Rachel Sennott, reprising her role as Danielle, the sullen and pleasantly inscrutable protagonist from Seligman's earlier short of the same name.

TIFF ’20: Get the Hell Out; Nomadland; David Byrne’s American Utopia

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Concert Doc, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Film Festivals, Taiwan, TIFF, Zombie

GET THE HELL OUT
**/****
starring Bruce Hung, Megan Lai, Tsung-Hua To, Chung-wang Wang
screenplay by I-Fan Wang, Shih-Keng Chien, Wan-Ju Yang
directed by I-Fan Wang

NOMADLAND
***/****
starring Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linday May, Swankie
written for the screen and directed by Chloé Zhao

American Utopia
***/****
directed by Spike Lee

by Bill Chambers Have the ticking time bombs the world is sitting on and TIFF’s significantly reduced slate resulted in the 2020 iteration of the festival–the COVID-19 TIFF, the pre-election TIFF, the world’s-on-fire TIFF–being programmed with increased political fervour? Three of the four films I’ve watched at TIFF 2020 suggest that’s the case in their topicality, though I will allow that the silliest of these, Taiwan’s Get the Hell Out, would not resonate nearly as much as it does were it not for these unremovable pandemic goggles I wear now, which transform everything old and new into ironic commentary on this moment in history. Get the Hell Out begins in medias res after a (sigh/jerk-off motion) zombie outbreak in parliament, then backtracks to show how the headstrong Hsiung (Megan Lai) was literally muscled out of office for refusing to endorse a chemical plant that will contaminate the environment with the rabies virus. She manipulates a lovestruck security guard with chronic–and portentous–nosebleeds named Wang (Bruce Ho) into running in her place, hoping to use him as a sock-puppet against her misogynistic former colleagues. Alas, he has his own cock-eyed agenda, and so the plague proceeds apace. Trapped in the parliament building, Hsiung and Wang are forced to fend off hordes of cannibalistic MPs as well as their nefarious rival, Li (Chung-wang Wang), the movie’s nominal Trump stand-in.

Pretty in Pink (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

September 8, 20201980s, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Molly Ringwald, Harry Dean Stanton, Jon Cryer, Andrew McCarthy
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch

by Bill Chambers John Hughes made his mark with screenplays that had straightforward, saleable hooks. National Lampoon’s Vacation is about a suburban family on a cross-country drive to a theme park. Mr. Mom is about a husband and wife switching places as the breadwinner of the family. Sixteen Candles is about a girl turning 16 whose family forgets her birthday. The Breakfast Club is about five high-school students serving detention on a Saturday. Weird Science is about a couple of geeks who Frankenstein themselves the perfect woman. But Pretty in Pink, inspired by though not based on The Psychedelic Furs‘ song of the same name, is an outlier in Hughes’s early filmography in that it’s merely an ode to his muse Molly Ringwald, its collection of feeble pretexts for shining the spotlight on her hardly constituting a premise. It’s a movie that operates on the somewhat shaky assumption that Ringwald, like Anna Karina before her, is cinema, her most mundane gestures becoming iconic through the simple act of photographing them. The ultimate irony, of course, is that when Hughes transposed every non-event that happens in Pretty in Pink onto Some Kind of Wonderful a year later, it resulted in what was arguably his most high-concept project yet: the boy version of Pretty in Pink.

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)

August 28, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, UK

**½/****
starring Dev Patel, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Armando Iannucci, Simon Blackwell, based on the book by Charles Dickens
directed by Armando Iannucci

by Walter Chaw I hate Charles Dickens. I hate what I know about him as a human being. I hate how he writes. I hate his books. To be sure I hated them, I read them all. Because I majored in English and then British Romanticism, I even had cause to study his work–sometimes in great, exhausting detail. I have read volumes of critical studies, been subjected to numerous stage, television, and film adaptations, and had the great displeasure of watching a “colour blind” local production of A Christmas Carol a few years ago that filled me with irritation and upset. I have listened patiently to professors, friends, girlfriends who swore by Dickens; their eyes get twinkly when they talk about him, like they were talking about the Beatles or some shit to someone who maybe just hasn’t heard the George Harrison tracks, yet, before forming an opinion. I read David Copperfield on a fancy-bound garage-sale find my parents brought home alongside volumes by Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and Melville. They were to be my friends through elementary school when I had precious few of the human kind. You could say it was movies and these books that taught me English, and you wouldn’t be far off. I still love those other authors. I still hate Dickens.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Fried Barry

August 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Africa

***½/****
starring Gary Green, Chanelle De Jager, Bianka Hartenstein, Sean Cameron Michael
written and directed by Ryan Kruger

by Walter Chaw South African hyphenate Ryan Kruger’s debut Fried Barry is just really fucking delightful, an amalgamation of The Greasy Strangler and John McNaughton’s unfairly-forgotten The Borrower. The glue that seals the grimy, appalling parts together is, of all things, E.T.. It’s in that juncture between the obscene and the profound where Fried Barry finds its singular genius as a creature so foul that when it suddenly, briefly, becomes Save the Green Planet! but with the victim/protagonist/antihero the saviour of a group of girls held in a pedophile’s torture dungeon, what already defied description suddenly becomes… Is it art? At least it’s useful, cogent, maybe brilliant surrealism in that by turning into something familiar, all of the bizarreness racks into focus as a critique of the conventions of our popular entertainments. Why, for instance, is E.T., a film about an alien symbiote attached to a child nearly to the point of killing the child, so beloved a family classic? Look, you’re either with it, or you’re decidedly not. But if you’re in, so is Fried Barry. Oh, mate, Fried Barry is emphatically in.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Columnist

August 17, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Netherlands

*/****
starring Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Rein Hofman
screenplay by Daan Windhorst
directed by Ivo van Aart

by Walter Chaw Pity the hot-button Film of the Moment that is still somehow not about very much at all. Such is the fate of Ivo van Aart’s The Columnist, which tackles Twitter and online trolling with style to burn and a game cast with nothing much to do and even less to say. Femke (Katja Herbers) is a widely-read columnist who’s made some enemies by suggesting that Zwarte Piet is racist and that women should be treated as human beings. Addicted to social media, she makes the fatal error of reading the comments, is driven mad, sort of (I think), and starts murdering her trolls after Googling them. There’s something about how she’s blocked until after she kills someone, at which point she’s able to pump out another widely-read piece about some meaningless piffle that keeps her employed. Worse, she’s now under a deadline (haha, see what I did there?) to complete a book–a setup for either escalation or piquant irony, though in the case of The Columnist, it’s setup for tepid social commentary made instantly impotent by the hellscape of our current reality.

Irresistible (2020)

June 24, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Rose Byrne
written and directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s Irresistible hates you, absolutely loathes you. It can’t believe it has to talk to you and so it’s smug and dismissive, and then at the end of it all, it offers up three different but equally repugnant endings that give the viewer a variety of shit sandwiches to choose from, though you do have to pick one. As a metaphor for what’s going on in the world right now, it’s on-the-nose. As a movie, it’s an assault more objectionable than any Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke miserabilist exercise, because it clothes itself in an affable sheaf of menial, liberal equivocation–but underneath it’s this boiling, nihilistic condemnation of every single one of you fucking idiots who let it get so bad. It brings to mind nothing so much as George Sanders’s suicide note expressing boredom with the very notion of you to the very last. Everything is terrible. The experiment is over. We failed. There’s no hope. And Irresistible is precisely the kind of asshole who offers a utopian social solution he clearly thinks is a hopeless fantasy but pretends is advice given earnestly so you don’t think he’s the other kind of asshole who just complains about how stupid people are all the time. It’s a film about the mortal tone-deafness of liberals that is itself mortally tone-deaf.

Dolittle (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 6, 20202020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Fantasy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it’s worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, “it” being a scene from Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing “pieces” summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan’s Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It’s played for laughs, but I wasn’t laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy’s accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who’s been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn’t for you, it’s for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.

Vivarium (2020)

March 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Satire, VOD

***½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris, Molly McCann
screenplay by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Vivarium cues what it's going to be about with a title that could, arguably, also describe movies: artificial, controlled environments constructed for the observation of collected specimens. As the film opens, nature footage of a cuckoo bird pushing baby birds out of their nest to take their place segues into grammar-school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) leading a classroom of kids acting out a windstorm. In the next scene, Gemma counsels one of her young charges as the child discovers the dead-bird babies on the ground beneath a tree. A cuckoo could be responsible, she says, and it's terrible, of course, but it's nature. If you were to stop watching Vivarium there, about five minutes in, you'd miss some fun stuff, but the whole film has already been summarized. The picture boils every impulse down to biological impetus, you see. But rather than making Vivarium simplistic, this philosophical determinism makes the behaviours of its subjects extraordinarily complex and interesting.

The Circus (1928) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 14, 2020****/****, 1920s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Charlie Chaplin, Allan Garvia, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker
written and directed by Charlie Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer It started with the tightrope. That was Charlie Chaplin’s original idea as he developed his feature-length comedy The Circus–his iconic character, the Tramp, forced into a high-wire act, defying death and injury on a rope stretched taut far above the ground. It was later, shortly before production started, that the monkeys came into the picture. Those mischievous animals, those gremlins, would crawl over his arms and body, wrap themselves around his face, and pull down his pants as the Tramp struggled to maintain his balance on the wire. From what we know of his off-screen life at the time, it’s easy to imagine why Chaplin felt bedevilled. His second marriage, to Lita Grey, still a teenager, was fundamentally unhappy. He spent his time away from home with divorce on his mind, and it was around this point he learned that Lita was pregnant with his second child. He also kept an eye out for the detectives he was sure had been hired to investigate his affair with Hearst’s wife, Marion Davies.

Onward (2020)

March 6, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, Keith Bunin
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Walter Chaw Onward is notable not because it features Disney/Pixar’s first LGBTQ character (a cop–Jesus, you guys–voiced by Lena Waithe), but because it’s the family-friendly studio’s first stoner comedy. Dan Scanlon’s follow-up to his middling Monsters University is an unholy amalgam of Detroit Rock City and Weekend at Bernie’s that finds two elf brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), going on a quest to resurrect the top half of their dead dad’s body for the one magical day they’ve conjured for him via an ancient spell and a “phoenix crystal,” the double for which serves as the film’s exhausted MacGuffin after they squander the first one. The setting is an industrialized world where there was once magic; as technology became easier than memorizing spells and perfecting belief, magic was left to lie fallow, just waiting for a winsome young elf with father and confidence issues to reintroduce it to the world. You can read this a few ways. The way I’m choosing to interpret “magic” is as a metaphor for the American progressive movement, which died at the end of the Sixties with a series of assassinations. If we lay this over Onward, then the film becomes a call to action for progressives in this country to rally after decades of being buried under the inequities of late capitalism.

Guns Akimbo (2020)

February 27, 2020****/****, 2020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu, Rhys Darby
written and directed by Jason Lei Howden

by Walter Chaw One of my favourite stories–much-embellished, probably, by its author–is Fritz Lang’s account of being called into Propaganda Minister Goebbels’s office in 1933 to be told that Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was going to be censored, alas, but would Lang like to be in charge of Nazi-run movie studio UFA? It’s funny because Lang had bankrupted UFA six years prior with the colossal flop that was Metropolis–an event that made UFA vulnerable to its eventual takeover. For context, during those last days of the Weimar, Leni Riefenstahl was the freshly-installed head of the Nazi Film Commission and had that year shot the annual Nuremberg Rally on behalf of her greatest admirer, Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl was a genius-level filmmaker eventually given more resources–the support of an entire industrialized nation–than arguably any other filmmaker received before or since. She used it to coin new ways of looking at things. When you watch a professional football game now, well, Riefenstahl set the stage for that. Star Wars, too.