Drama Archives - Page 11 of 119 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Minor Premise (2020)

January 20, 20212020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, VOD

***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Paton Ashbrook, Dana Ashbrook
written by Justin Moretto, Eric Schultz, Thomas Torrey
directed by Eric Schultz

by Walter Chaw The engine driving Eric Schultz’s Minor Premise, already tangled and the highest of high concepts, is in fact deceptively simple: What would happen if we could map every individual personality trait we house in our heads and then, once mapped, what would happen if we tried to isolate the one we liked? Jerry Lewis did a variation on this with his The Nutty Professor, a film that is, among other things, a withering assessment of former partner Dean Martin and his single setting of sociopathic charm. Lewis indicts himself as well as buck-toothed and bumbling, brilliant but pathetic, yearning for some Dino blood to stiffen his backbone. Minor Premise posits that “Rat Pack” is just one of nine settings for us; brilliant, troubled scientist Ethan (Sathya Sridharan) wonders if his productivity might be elevated by cutting out all the noise and letting “intellect” take the wheel.

Sputnik (2020)

January 19, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Russia, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Pyotr Fyodorov, Fedor Bondarchuk, Anton Vasilev
written by Oleg Malovichko, Andrey Zolotarev
directed by Egor Abramenko

by Walter Chaw It should come as no shock that there were so many superlative horror films in 2020–not because 2020 was a year of horrors, but because horror films have always been the canary in the coal mine. That a few of these warnings are arriving in the middle of the end carries the added melancholy knowledge that none of this is was unexpected. I think I even said something that November night in 2016 about how we were about to get some real bangers in genre cinema the next few years. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Clearly. Once the dust settles and whatever’s left of us finds a moment to compare notes, a few of the worst will try to say that no one could have seen this coming. But everyone knew, everyone knows, and yet here we are anyway. Tiresias posed the rhetorical question a few millennia ago, “How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise?” It’s terrible, Terry. The fucking worst.

Minari (2020)

January 10, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama

****/****
starring Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Youn Yuh-jung, Will Patton
written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw I didn’t like my grandmother, either–the way she smelled (mothballs, I think)–but I always equated it with Taiwan and foreignness, you know, the parts of myself I was trying to burn away so the kids would accept me at my predominantly white school. If I recall correctly, all the way through high school I was one of maybe two or three Asian students. A great-aunt of mine visited one year. She fantasized about killing the geese at the park and eating them. It made me crazy when she spoke this way. I was mortified, embarrassed to be out with her; I walked apart from my family as if the distance would make people forget I wasn’t white. My grandmother would tell me about how stupid Americans were and how different my parents were here, how they didn’t used to fight like they do now that worry over money dominated our lives. My dad was a brilliant guy, a grandmaster Go player with a Ph.D. in Geochemistry. Or he would have had one, but he didn’t get along with his professors–and, he would tell me, he was very bad at German. (For a while, the only textbooks for what he was studying were written in German.) So he opened stores, learned silversmithing, and created jewelry. And he made a lot of business investments that were mostly failed that served to alienate him from us, strain his marriage, and rush him to the grave when he was 54. That’s seven years older than I am now.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – Netflix

January 6, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid
directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw The thing I say about Charlie Kaufman films is that I never really understand them, but they always seem to understand me. I suppose there are many ways to unpack his work, but it always only means one thing to me, and I wish I could articulate what that one thing is. If I were able to, I would know something important. Then I wonder if I don’t know it already, and I’m just protecting myself from articulating it because the thing that is important to know is also very painful to know. I’m Thinking of Ending Things tells me what it’s about when Jake (Jesse Plemons), on an interminable drive home to the family farm with his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley), tries in vain to recite the first few lines of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Lucy interrupts him as he starts to make fun of the long title (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”), asking if he’s sure that’s not the body of the poem and generally souring the atmosphere enough that Jake gives up. The first lines of the Immortality Ode are:

The Midnight Sky (2020) – Netflix

December 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall
screenplay by Mark L. Smith, based on the book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw Of late, I’ve wondered what my madness will come up with when it reaches the point of conjuring metaphors. Will it be a house of peeling wallpaper, rats in the spaces between the upstairs as a reference to me falling apart? Will it be the phantom of the ghost of a memory of something I regretted doing as a child, made manifest as a foundling I must take care of but can’t ever quiet? Maybe it’ll be the manuscript I write obsessively in spirals on the floor, or the way I wipe down every surface, exposed and hidden, in a Lady Macbeth-like compulsion to erase the indelible stink of a lifetime of creeping moral corruption. Maybe it’ll just be three ghosts telling me it’s not too late. It is too late for Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), who sits by himself in an abandoned arctic research facility in 2046, three weeks after THE EVENT that has caused Earth to become uninhabitable for humans–though not so uninhabitable that Dr. Augustine Lofthouse doesn’t have time to eat cereal and give himself blood transfusions. Metaphors have survived, too.

News of the World (2020)

December 20, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Western

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham
screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles
directed by Paul Greengrass

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 It’s a “Spongebob Squarepants” gag, maybe, or something from “Phineas & Ferb”. Some smart, post-modern cartoon. There’ll be a bunch of quick-cuts, several different angles, self-conscious camera movements, and whooshing noises to reveal, at the end of it all, a snail or a sloth moving along glacially. Maybe the punchline is a frog giving out a bored ribbit. This is how Paul Greengrass starts News of the World as well, with Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kidd the bored frog in question. So much sound and fury in the opening moments of the piece, ending with the exciting reveal of Captain Kidd packing his horse to go somewhere. The movie doesn’t get better as it goes along, but it does calm down a little, settling into the comfortable cadence of a frictionless, awards-season prestige piece so aerodynamic it’ll pass right through you without leaving a mark. Like magic. Call it “The Road to Perdition, Anti-Western Edition” and you’d know enough about it to save yourself the fat awards-season runtime.

On the Rocks (2020)

December 16, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Romance, Streaming

****/****
starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Of all the people making them, Sofia Coppola makes Sofia Coppola movies better than anyone else. Her body of work is remarkable for its consistency–such as that of a Japanese master like Ozu or Mizoguchi, frankly. So the chief complaint of nepotism levied against her strikes me as something of a mixed blessing. I don’t know that many creators have ever had the cachet to make exactly the films they want to make. Every single time. And the ones I can think of for which this is also true, it either wasn’t always true, hasn’t resulted in the level of visibility that Coppola’s films earn, or tend to be the province of men exclusively. I wonder about the resentment of some critics towards Coppola for somehow not being representative enough, as though any one artist can or should be expected to check every box. Best, often, not to try. I think of another woman and filmmaker with a similar amount of creative single-mindedness, Claire Denis, scoffing in an interview with Jonathan Romney of THE GUARDIAN when asked about the Hollywood #MeToo movement: “That’s a discussion that’s only being had in rich countries. The world is not just the United States and Europe. It’s a debate of spoiled children. I couldn’t care less about the Weinstein affair.” Where Denis is indicated mostly by how little she cares what you think, Coppola is branded as a figure mortally wounded by her time in the public view. That vulnerability, real or only perceived, inextricably infuses every frame of her movies with just a little extra trembling pathos.

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

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.

Mank (2020) – Netflix

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Streaming

**½/****
starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance
screenplay by Jack Fincher
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw I thought a lot, as I am wont to do from time to time, of the 1996 adult film Shock: Latex 2–directed by an interesting artist working in a devalued genre, Michael Ninn–while watching David Fincher’s new film, Mank, based on the life of Hollywood Golden Age screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Both films are fetish items, anchored to a specific time and aesthetic, and both deal with eroticized figments of active, sometimes onanistic, imaginations. They even use the same techniques to imitate mediums, the better to replicate sensations attached to genres, cults of personalities, periods of time. The former, the literal porno, has transitional scenes involving a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who serves as a sort of phantasmagoric guide loosely tying together a series of otherwise largely-disconnected vignettes. (Clive Barker uses this rampantly eroticized icon to similar effect in his short story “Son of Celluloid.”) Fincher, meanwhile, uses screenplay-text chyrons to announce sequences involving an entire cast of cunning simulacrums of objects of that same fetishistic–at least for the cinephile–significance.

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.

Requiem for a Dream (2000) [Director’s Cut] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 26, 20202000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
screenplay by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky, based upon the book by Selby Jr.
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Bryant Frazer Few films are anywhere near as well made–as fierce and committed–as Requiem for a Dream, which stands as a 20-year-old landmark in an especially fertile era of New York indie filmmaking and one of the most expertly executed feel-bad narratives in the history of popular culture. Darren Aronofsky is a hell of a director, but he’s always been a little, well, intense for my taste. He’s got vision and passion to spare, and he clearly inspires dedication and devotion from his actors, yet I always feel there’s something critical missing from the films themselves. If π is David Lynch without an angle on the truly bizarre and Black Swan is David Cronenberg without the painful psychological acuity, then Requiem for a Dream is John Waters without the sense of humour. I know Waters is friendly with Aronofsky, but imagining him watching this in a dark theatre and positively cackling at its most painfully outré gambits is what helps get me through its pitiless final act.

I’m Your Woman (2020)

November 3, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Thriller

****/****
starring Rachel Brosnahan, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Arinzé Kene, Bill Heck
written by Julia Hart & Jordan Horowitz
directed by Julia Hart

by Walter Chaw She’s talking to a stranger about her miscarriages and how her desire for a child burned a little more to ash with each of them. The embers were cold and black until one day, her husband brought home a baby and told her it was hers. I think she’s surprised how quickly something kindled inside of her. In many ways, her story is the story of how things you thought were dead in you can surprise you with their life. She tells the stranger that the baby laughs whenever she sings a particular song to it, him, in a particular way. She gives a demonstration. She doesn’t know where her husband is now and the stranger doesn’t either, of course. And then we’re outside the diner where she’s sitting, the kind designed to look like an old Airstream trailer. Hell, maybe it is an old Airstream, but anyway, the rounded edges of it dissolve into the curved underside of a bridge right at the same time the first notes of the song she sings for “her” baby fill the soundstage like it was conjured from some hopeful place. Like some other miracle.

Come Play (2020)

November 2, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Gillian Jacobs, John Gallagher Jr., Azhy Robertson, Winslow Fegley
written and directed by Jacob Chase

by Walter Chaw It’s difficult to know whether writer-director Jacob Chase’s feature debut Come Play means well or means ill; whether it’s an earnest attempt to discuss autism using a horror premise as metaphor for its impact on a family, or just a cheap rip-off of the already-cheap “Jung for Dummies” flick The Babadook. Even its execution vacillates between “super clumsy” and “surprisingly effective.” It’s like Come Play is at odds with itself–almost as though there were compromises made to get it made, and so what results is a possibly compelling premise with a couple of nice moments reduced to a derivative stock chiller that’s all the more frustrating for that promise. A horror movie about a creature haunting our various screens is at least timely, right? A Ringu update, perhaps. A Mercury Rising redux swinging drunkenly from unintentionally hilarious to probably-unintentionally offensive likely wasn’t the desired outcome.

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 ‘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: Still Processing + Every Day’s Like This

September 21, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

STILL PROCESSING
***½/****
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

EVERY DAY’S LIKE THIS
***½/****
starring Kacey Rohl, Daniel Kash, Francis Melling, Krystina Bojanowski
written and directed by Lev Lewis

by Angelo Muredda Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari mourns and preserves the past in her wrenching new nonfiction short, Still Processing, whose title puns on the intricate work of processing photographic images along with the spectral traces of those they depict. Evoking a tradition of poetic but philosophically robust memorial essay films and literary texts about engaging with the material record of the dead, from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the film is nevertheless shot through with Romvari’s modest sensibility. Though Romvari herself is front and centre throughout, the film is a quiet affair, shot in the loneliness of archives, darkrooms, and bedrooms, frequently lit by faint glowing lights and punctuated by a running subtitle track that elucidates the filmmaker’s emotional state. A compelling marriage of form and theme, the film is also gorgeously photographed. Particularly striking is a sequence that finds Romvari working solo among the cold brutalist architecture of York University, taking old photos of her deceased brothers David and Jonathan out of the humble archive of the box they’ve been housed in for the first time. She delicately arranges their faces on a nondescript table that soon becomes a kind of installation, effectively massaging her siblings back to life through her hands in real-time, as if gesturing to the labour and art of processing grief that only filmmaking can accomplish.

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: 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: 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.

Ghost in the Shell (1995) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

September 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
directed by Mamoru Oshii

by Bryant Frazer I’ll get this out of the way first: the soul is the ghost and the body is the shell. The title is a reference to Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which itself refers to a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the duality of mind and body. The writer and illustrator Masamune Shirow borrowed and altered the phrase for his serialized 1989 manga “Mobile Armored Riot Police”, which bore the subtitle “The Ghost in the Shell.” I haven’t read the manga, but the animated feature it inspired is positively heady with ideas. Ghost in the Shell is a cop movie about robots with human souls. It’s science-fiction about the human rights of artificial intelligence. And it’s a fantasy about a sexy cyborg who knows how to use a gun. It’s all of those things, and it’s a disquisition on human consciousness, a meditation on urban loneliness, and also, maybe, a poem about unrequited love. It’s extraordinary.