Disability Archives - Page 2 of 4

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.

Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2020****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2019, 2020, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Cronenberg, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Television, Thriller, Werewolf

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen’s score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore’s work that if I didn’t know better… Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What’s sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they are–so like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well as–here’s another German term for you–overwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979’s Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zone‘s release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a “name” composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall. I don’t think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, who’s idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, you’ll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and that’s true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, I’m seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenberg’s voice echoed in my own.

TIFF ’20: Penguin Bloom

September 20, 20202020, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Andrew Lincoln, Rachel House, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Harry Cripps & Shaun Grant, based on the book by Cameron Bloom & Bradley Trevor Greive
directed by Glendyn Ivin

by Angelo Muredda Naomi Watts should stop vacationing in Thailand. That’s just about the only lesson worth heeding in the faux-inspirational, would-be edifying Penguin Bloom, which plays out like an unofficial remake of J.A. Bayona’s otherwise forgettable The Impossible, the last time Watts played a wealthy Westerner with a pack of sandy-haired boys getting gored on holiday in Southeast Asia. Glendyn Ivin’s anonymously directed and bone-tired disability melodrama stars Watts (also a producer) as real-life well-to-do Australian mom turned ParaCanoe athlete Sam Bloom, who experiences a life-changing spinal-cord injury after a rooftop railing gives way under her. (As in The Impossible, we see the traumatic injury several times, including in uncanny nightmare sequences that mark the only time either film could be called stylish.) Newly disabled and deflated as she wheels around her spacious home, Sam finds her way back to life–which in Ivin’s limited imagination appears to consist of being a good mom even though she might not be able to reach over and put bandaids on her kids’ scraped knees like before–by nursing an injured magpie the family dubs Penguin. Meanwhile, Sam’s eldest son, Noah (Griffin Murray-Johnston), makes a video essay celebrating his mother’s resilience and mourning for the charmed life the family has lost, which conveniently doubles as a thematic narration track, in case any of the messages (presumably ported wholesale from the Cameron Bloom/Bradley Trevor Greive book on which the film is based) pass us by.

TIFF ’20: I Am Greta

September 20, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sweden, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Nathan Grossman

by Bill Chambers A deceptively stock rise-to-influence documentary, I Am Greta has haunted me like nothing that begins with “Hulu Presents” reasonably should. The film is, of course, about teen activist Greta Thunberg, who went on a school strike in her native Stockholm to bring awareness to climate change and became a global phenomenon. It begins at the beginning, in 2018, as Thunberg takes a seat outside the Swedish parliament building with a simple sign that reads “Skolstrejk för klimatet.” One older woman stops to scold her, more or less, for risking her future by skipping school. Thunberg counters that at the rate we’re destroying the planet, she has no future to risk. The woman walks away in a huff: kids, right? This fearless interaction not only establishes a key theme of I Am Greta–Thunberg’s ability to make Boomer heads explode, Scanners-style–but is also something of a miracle, given that Thunberg, who has Asperger’s, once went three years without speaking to another living soul except her parents. What triggered this mutism was her horrified reaction to an educational video about the impact of climate change on polar bears; what snapped her out of it was her realization that she could change her ways (going vegetarian, unplugging power cords, etc.)–and potentially those of others, by drawing as much attention to our environmental crisis, the looming Sixth Extinction, as possible.

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

September 15, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.

TIFF 2019: Pain and Glory + Varda by Agnès

September 8, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Spain, TIFF

Dolor y gloria
***½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Exteandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Varda par Agnès
****/****
directed by Agnès Varda

by Bill Chambers Salvador Mallo is first seen in hydrotherapy for his scarred back, lost in an underwater reverie. The lapping waves trigger a memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz, who must have a painting of herself rotting away in the attic) washing clothes in the river when he was just a boy. Played by Pedro Almodóvar discovery and muse Antonio Banderas, Salvador is an informally retired film director who dresses like Almodóvar, resides in Almodóvar’s real-life apartment, and suffers a litany of ailments–spinal problems, tinnitus–much like Almodóvar’s own. The kinkiness of Almodóvar’s work has always made it seem personal and confessional, but with Pain and Glory he moves into the roman à clef territory of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz–although Pain and Glory is considerably more chill, treating even picking up a heroin habit in middle age as less self-destructive than incorrigible. Salvador is introduced to the drug while making amends with Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), star of his acclaimed Sabor (“Flavour”). Alberto is a long-time junkie; Salvador once held this against his performance in Sabor but no longer does, because time has altered his perception of it. The two agree to do a Q&A at a screening of the film’s restoration, which, uh, doesn’t quite go as planned but does lead to Alberto putting on an unpublished play that Salvador wrote, which leads to Salvador briefly reconnecting with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the old lover the play is about. This spurs him to be proactive about his health: Salvador realizes that he needs to get back to making art, because sharing this one story with others has turned out to be so much more rewarding than wallowing in nostalgia.

Howard the Duck (1986) [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 21, 20191980s, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A- 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.

Pet Sematary (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 17, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Horror, Stephen King, Thriller, Zombie

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist
screenplay by Stephen King, based on his novel
directed by Mary Lambert

“Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart, and yet you cannot buy anything with grief. Because grief is worthless.”
-Jefe (Rubén Blades), The Counselor

by Bill Chambers A VICE UK review of the recent Happy Death Day 2U came in for a shellacking on social media because of a click-baity tweet suggesting it was the “first” slasher movie about grief, a claim that only demonstrated a lack of expertise while making a sacrificial lamb of Happy Death Day 2U (which scarcely benefited from the bad-faith attention). Neither the headline nor the subheader of the review itself is as boldly specious, but there in the body of the piece is this: “Christopher Landon’s latest, Happy Death Day 2U[,] might be the first slasher that actually centers on dealing with grief.” (The headline–“‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Is More About Grief Than Horror”–nevertheless bothers me, too, incidentally: grief is horror.) So often accused of cynicism because they’re formulated to maximize a body count, slashers are engineered to comment on the capricious nature of existence, and the best ones seize on this to acknowledge the toll of loss on the survivors (Black Christmas (1974), Rob Zombie’s Halloween II)–while even the most mediocre ones tend to have a killer motivated by a deep and incurable sorrow (see: The Toolbox Murders (1978), the first Friday the 13^th).

Shazam! (2019)

April 5, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by Henry Gayden
directed by David F. Sandberg

by Walter Chaw The thing David F. Sandberg's Shazam!, the Captain Marvel I actually like, has going for it is that, like the recent Aquaman (which it takes a jab at during a mid-closing-credits sequence), it doesn't take itself too seriously. Not to say that it doesn't tackle some heavy topics–foster children, domestic abuse, sexuality, race, disability–but that it does so with a kind of good-natured bonhomie that finds one of its kid characters (the Asian one) calling a couple of bullies "assfags." In that sense, Shazam! plays a lot like Michael Ritchie's The Golden Child: another fantasy film with a charismatic lead pitched at children but packed with stuff just over the line of appropriate. There are a couple of nasty murders in this cheerfully self-aware send-up of Big (note a memorable scene set in a toy store), and there's a perfectly-landed recurring joke about a strip club–neither of which, let's face it, as inappropriate as the pedophilia that serves as the emotional centre of Big. Shazam! is, in other words, a shaggy-dog superhero flick that happily checks several boxes while unapologetically indulging in its chaotic silliness. Funnier would have been if schlumpy Seth Rogen had played the adult Shazam rather than hunky Zachary Levi, but there's intellectual property to respect and all. A shame The Rock already did a version of this role in the Jumanji sequel. At least he's rumoured to be cast as Captain Marvel's arch-enemy Black Adam in some film down the line.

FrightFest ’18: Lasso

August 26, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

***/****written by Roberto Marinasdirected by Evan Cecil by Walter Chaw Trish is the star of Lasso. Ostensibly a secondary character, she's played by trans activist Skyler Cooper (who identifies with masculine pronouns) with confidence, beauty, and strength. After the initial "is she a boy or a girl?" question asked by congenital screw-up Simon (Andrew Jacobs), Trish is just accepted as this embodiment of strength and empathy. When Simon beats himself up for causing the death of a few of his buddies, it's Trish who recognizes the importance of preserving his confidence for the long night ahead. She takes the lead.…

FrightFest ’18: Upgrade

August 25, 2018****/****, 2018, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/****
starring Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie
written and directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw I can't imagine I'll ever see a better Venom movie than Leigh Whannell's Upgrade, the story of a mild-mannered Luddite mechanic named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) who one day, after delivering a tricked-out antique ride to cyber-genius Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), is paralyzed in a terrible accident and forced to watch his girlfriend, tech-company functionary Asha (Melanie Vallejo), get assassinated by modded-out thugs led by psychopath Fisk (Benedict Hardie). In the film's near-future, there are limited Tetsuo: The Iron Man body modifications like guns embedded in gunsel's palms and enhanced limbs and vision alongside more common advances like self-driving cars and A.I. assistants. The tech, in other words, is entirely credible at first, as the film eases us into nanotechnology and an A.I., STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden), implanted in Grey to not just "cure" his paralysis but also, when allowed to operate independently, turn Grey into a one-man vengeance puppet. The first scene of STEM's emancipation is a glorious invention of fight choreography and performance philosophy: Grey is literally possessed, doesn't really "invest" in what his body's doing to other bodies, and, at the end of the sequence, begs with the last not-dismembered bad guy to please not get up off the floor. It's a Buster Keaton gag, really–the stone-faced centre of a violent storm. Marshall-Green's performance reminded me of both Steve Martin's in All of Me and Jeff Fahey's in Body Parts. In a year that saw another instalment in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible series, this here is the year's best action scene.

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

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

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

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

Hot Docs ’18: We Could Be Heroes

May 4, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Morocco, Qatar, Sports, Tunisia

**½/****
directed by Hind Bensari

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Oy, that title. It thankfully proves somewhat ironic, although disability docs would be wise going forward to avoid sentimental trigger words like “heroes,” Bowie homage or not, if they don’t want to be stigmatized as inspiration porn. The problem with We Could Be Heroes is that it’s easier to peg what it isn’t than what it is. Director Hind Bensari follows Moroccan athlete Azzedine Nouiri as he trains for the 2016 Rio Paralympics. He’d already set a world-record for shot put at the 2012 games, but some extracurricular research tells me that Englishman Scott Jones bested him just a year later. Bensari prefers an elliptical, direct-cinema approach that forgoes these expositional niceties, which I think is a misstep when we see wheelchair user Nouiri ambulatory without any sort of elucidation. There are spectrums of disability that transcend the naked eye, but try telling that to the idiots who memed a woman in a wheelchair standing up to reach a bottle up high in a liquor store with jokes about her faking it. Nouiri is not faking it–classified as an F34 athlete (meaning he has “moderate to severe hypertonia in both legs”), he credits his disability, in a rare autobiographical aside, to keeping him off drugs in his junkie neighbourhood, though that begs the intervention of a filmmaker follow-up question, too. (“Why?”) Bensari respects her subjects’ reserve to the point of seeming incurious to a near perverse degree. As a conspicuously-disabled individual who’s subjected to 20 Questions pretty much every time he leaves the house, I wish more people were like her; as someone tasked with reviewing We Could Be Heroes, I wish she were less reverential. She has a habit of lingering long enough to normalize her subjects, which some may find suitably profound, but not a Frederick Wiseman length of time, which would allow the idiosyncratic details of the challenges they face to emerge organically.

Cult of Chucky (2017) [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

October 9, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Fiona Dourif, Adam Hurtig, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Bill Chambers It’s not uncommon for a long-running horror series to embroider an increasingly convoluted mythology over time, as the kind of premise that launches horror icons also tends to be too primal to sustain a franchise. That’s why Michael Myers became part of the Thorn cult and Freddy Krueger sired offspring while his own backstory continued to blossom. The Chucky saga, the story of a bloodthirsty Cabbage Patch Kid run amok, is no exception, but it’s utterly unique in how the style of these films has pivoted, to use a buzzword, with the evolving narrative. What began as a mostly straight-faced slasher trilogy with a different identity altogether–these were Child’s Play movies–was continued seven years later as a tongue-in-cheek ode to monster mash-ups with 1998’s Bride of Chucky. Post-modernism then entered the picture and the comedy was pushed to the nth in Chucky creator Don Mancini’s directorial debut Seed of Chucky, which seemed to exceed the threshold for camp shared by both the franchise and its fans. Another seven years passed (incidentally, the mythical length of time it takes for the human body to shed its skin) before Mancini’s Curse of Chucky resurrected the title character, this time as the cursed object in an old-dark-house chiller. Now Cult of Chucky sees Mancini retrofitting his Mickey Mouse once again for a Bad Dreams-style psycho-ward thriller. Say what you will about Mancini being a maker of Chucky movies almost exclusively (he’s the rare auteur to initiate, then stay with, a horror franchise), but within these limited parameters he’s had an opportunity to show more range than most genre filmmakers.

TIFF ’17: Suburbicon + Bodied

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Satire, Thriller, TIFF

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens’ and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s. Trouble is, the best parts aren’t that great and the worst parts…yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn’t just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie’s pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-user wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them’s blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin’ Cousins.) One night, while Jupe’s Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge’s system can’t handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can’t figure out why his father won’t positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers’ casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they’re always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

Logan Lucky (2017)

August 17, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig
written by Rebecca Blunt
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Steven Soderbergh returns from a self-imposed retirement of all of four years with Logan Lucky, a heist movie so steeped in its maker’s creative and commercial history that it casually makes time in its climactic moments for a newscaster to dub its working-class heroes’ shenanigans “Ocean’s 7/11.” Begging to be read as an unnecessary but enjoyable victory lap from a filmmaker who hasn’t gone away so much as temporarily opted out of the rat race of alternating between formalist exercises, crowd-pleasers, and prestige pictures, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh working in his most amiable register–and for the most part doffing his aesthetic predilection for piss-yellow lighting–while still cycling through his pet interests of late. A polymath by nature, as evidenced by his annual viewing logs, Soderbergh more or less successfully wields Logan Lucky into a charming sampler platter of his tastes, from hitting genre story beats faithfully to realizing the smallest procedural details and celebrating sincere Americana while bemoaning its toxic corporatization.

Hot Docs ’17: Resurrecting Hassan

May 6, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Chile, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2017

****/****directed by Carlo Guillermo Proto Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Denis Harting, his childhood sweetheart Peggy, and their daughter Lauviah busk together as a capella singers on the Montreal metro. Peggy prefers performing outside to inside: "It's more fun and it's more money. And people are a bit goofier." She says this to her secret boyfriend, Philou, during one of their transatlantic phone calls, which she's becoming increasingly brazen about. If you're going to pity Denis, pity him…

The Bye Bye Man (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 13, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Faye Dunaway
screenplay by Jonathan Penner, based on “The Bridge to Body Island” by Robert Damon Schneck
directed by Stacy Title

by Bill Chambers The Bye Bye Man begins as Terminator: Nebbish, with a Poindexter in a sweater vest named Larry (Leigh Whannell, of Saw fame) pulling up to a suburban home and asking the lady of the house, Jane (Lara Knox), if she told anybody “about the name.” Affirmative. Larry then returns to his vehicle, retrieves a shotgun, and blasts a hole through Jane’s front door. We see a man jump out of his wheelchair in the living-room window in a tiny, easy-to-miss background detail I suspect would’ve been airbrushed out of a more respectable film, because the prologue ends there in the theatrical cut. In the unrated version on Blu-ray, it continues on to show Larry entering the house, finishing Jane off, executing the wheelchair dude, Rick (Andrew Gorell), as he futilely drags himself across the carpet, and grimly, dutifully marching down the street to kill some neighbours Rick just threw under the bus. Smoothly staged in one take, the sequence reminds not unfavourably of A Serious Man, getting most of its period authenticity–the year is 1969–and middle-class dread from an aesthetic ape of that film. (The chyron-ascribed Madison, WI setting is pretty close to Coen Brothers territory, too.) It’s suitably horrific. Until, that is, you start thinking about Rick: Why does his escape plan involve slumping to the floor like a sack of potatoes? The whole point of wheelchairs, see, is that they have wheels–an innovation that gave disabled people an efficient, dignified way to get a bag of chips from the kitchen or flee an axe murderer. As we will soon discover, the titular Bye Bye Man makes his marks do absurd, irrational things; the problem is, The Bye Bye Man doesn’t quite know how to portray this without being hilarible itself.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Short Films

October 15, 20162016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.

TIFF ’16: The Bad Batch; Colossal; Jackie

October 13, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Chile, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, TIFF

THE BAD BATCH
**½/****
starring Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

COLOSSAL
**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

JACKIE
***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Bill Chambers Three very different #TIFF16 films–a postapocalyptic cannibal western (The Bad Batch), a modestly-scaled kaiju eiga (Colossal), and a period docudrama (Jackie)–form a trilogy in my mind thematically linked by crestfallen female protagonists who discover reserves of strength in dire situations. The Bad Batch is the only one of these movies directed by a woman, though, and dare I say you can tell, not only in how the camera softly caresses Jason Momoa’s Olympian contours, but also in the way the framing and blocking of the heroine imply the constant peril of being a woman. Working through the neophyte filmmaker’s genre playbook, director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with this dystopian flick most reminiscent of the Australian strain in terms of vibe/aesthetics, what with its shantytown sets, symbolic names, and obligatory feral child. (The only thing missing is a car fetish.) Winsome Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to the other side of some Trumpian fence in Texas with only the clothes on her back and a tattoo that identifies her as an undesirable (or bad batch). Almost immediately she’s dragged away to a cannibal camp, where they chop off her right arm. Missing a leg, too, by the time she escapes, she finds refuge–and prosthetic limbs–in the village of Comfort, whose denizens mostly give her space. Time and body-image issues stoke her desire for revenge, however, putting her on a collision course with Momoa’s Miami Man, a brilliant sketch artist who’s also a fearsome, unsympathetic consumer of human flesh.