Drama Archives - Page 16 of 123 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Call of the Wild (2020)

February 22, 20202020, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Gillan, Cara Gee, Dan Stevens
screenplay by Michael Green, based on the book by Jack London
directed by Chris Sanders

by Walter Chaw Chris Sanders’s The Call of the Wild shares a few character names and a setting with the Jack London novella upon which it’s ostensibly based but exists in a perverse fantasia of its own that has more in common with Lars Von Trier’s surreal Zentropa (or Tom Schiller’s Nothing Lasts Forever, to which Zentropa owes more than a little) than it does with London’s critique of capitalism. Scenes of the Alaskan Gold Rush herein have about them the crazed Uncanny Valley effect of The Polar Express, which is only slightly less distracting than The Call of the Wild‘s imagining of an egalitarian utopia free of racism, sexism, even classism. The final triumph of dog-kind in the film recalls, of all things, Matt Reeves’s superlative Planet of the Apes trilogy, postulating a future in which hyper-intelligent, non-human mammals inherit the earth. Spearheading this new species of hyper-intelligent freak dog is Buck (shades of Corey Haim’s experimental super-dog in Watchers), who in classic Red Scare-agitprop fashion embodies all the best traits of the Old Hollywood Man of Action archetype: being kind to his fellow sled dogs like some canine Babe handing out jellybeans before saving human maidens from drowning.

Seberg (2019)

February 19, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Jack O’Connell, Margaret Qualley, Anthony Mackie
written by Joe Shrapnel & Anna Waterhouse
directed by Benedict Andrews

by Walter Chaw Benedict Andrews aspires to Alan J. Pakula with his paranoid biopic of martyred Nouvelle Vague sensation Jean Seberg but approaches it like Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can instead. His Seberg is a handsome, even slick production with a great cast and a bright period production design where something rougher-hewn, something grainier and consistently darker, might have given it a more appropriately claustrophobic feel. Shot as a prestige movie trying very hard to be About Something, Seberg has the effect of making Iowa-born Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) seem shallow and silly, every bit the accidental activist and media-diagnosed hysteric she was portrayed as during her lifetime. Andrews often obscures her with foreground objects to suggest a voyeuristic perspective, allows a lot of repetitive dialogue from Jean about how she knows she’s being bugged, and goes so far as to invent a sympathetic FBI agent named Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) to confess to his wife (Margaret Qualley) that his agency is engaged in ratfucking Seberg for her support of the Black Panthers. But when your film looks this clean and expensive, the feeling is one of a privileged perspective acting like a tourist for some borrowed righteousness.

Blow-Up (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 17, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Blowup
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A
starring Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (English dialogue in collaboration with Edward Bond), inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw Michelango Antonioni’s Blowup, when it appeared at the end of 1966, marked the confluence of a great many cultural throughlines. Sanctified by the grace of a long theatrical run on the rep circuit in the United States, it all but ensured (with an assist from Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that film’s gleeful use of the term “hump the hostess”) the final death of the antiquated Production Code when audiences disregarded the promise of eternal hellfire and went to see the damn thing anyway. There were other foreign arthouse sensations before it, of course (notably Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with which Blowup shares some surface similarity), but it was Blowup that felt like the revolutionary bellwether for the rise of the foreign arthouse as something of a genre unto itself. The picture’s success was of a moment with the peak of the British Mod period and right there with the birth of America’s version of it: namely, the Summer of Love and the concurrent season of assassination. We never quite recovered from that whiplash between love and death. Similarly, film language has never recovered from the teleological disruption of Blowup.

Shutter Island (2010) [10th Anniversary Limited Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 14, 20202000s, 2010, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/****
BD – Image A Sound B Extras B-
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island left me breathless with delight. The rack-focus through mess-hall implements; swaying along a ceiling as we peer beyond the door to the head, where our hero, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is losing his lunch; the way a ferry blows through a fog bank like Travis Bickle’s cab through the steam escaping a New York sewer cap. When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there’s even a moment when the smoke from Teddy’s cigarette retreats into the butt)–and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy’s fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle. (It’s not until later that we understand the full extent of this self-reference.) Shutter Island is among the director’s handsomest films, and moments of it suggest there’s a masterpiece here–as a WWII Holocaust drama, or a ghost story, or a period Red Menace piece, or a 1960s Manchurian Candidate manqué, or a 1940s Freud clinic, or a G-Man noir, or a straight procedural, or a modernist existential piece–if he wants it. But it’s less than the sum of its tantalizing parts, providing instead a hackneyed climax that proves just another votive lit in Dennis Lehane’s church of dead children.

The Rhythm Section (2020)

February 12, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Revenge, UK

***½/****
starring Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Mays
screenplay by Mark Burnell, based on his novel
directed by Reed Morano

by Walter Chaw Over a black screen at the start of Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section, we’re invited to think of the heartbeat as drums and breathing as the bass accompanying it. I would have swapped them, but either way it works as a symbolic framework to marry film to music, and perhaps the process of making a film to a collaborative endeavour like the frisson between musicians in a band–or the autonomous functions of the body that keep you going even when you’re unconscious. When I think about “rhythm” as a metaphor, I think of the various breathing methods and strategies devised to help women through labour. Blame Stephen King’s The Breathing Method, the only one of the four novellas from his Different Seasons anthology yet to be adapted for the screen. In it, a young woman has so prepared herself for the birthing process that her head goes through the motions of it even after being separated from her body. The thing to which The Rhythm Section aspires, then, appears to be to create something, or to indeed be something, so drilled and efficient that it operates purely on impulse and instinct.

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 20201930s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue, William Gargan, William Collier, Jr.
screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, from the novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner
directed by Stephen Roberts

by Bryant Frazer In 1933, Paramount Pictures released The Story of Temple Drake, an unusually frank melodrama that depicted a brutal sexual assault and its aftermath, with special attention paid to the reputation of the well-liked party girl named in the title. Released during that brief, free-wheeling period before the industry began enforcing its production code to clamp down on screen sex and violence, The Story of Temple Drake took pains to show how a woman could fall prey to sexual predators through no real fault of her own. It also illustrated in detail her downward psychological spiral, fuelled, in large part, by a well-founded fear of the opprobrium of others. Just last week, in an interview recorded for THE NEW YORK TIMES during Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, reporter Megan Twohey asked the defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, whether she had ever been sexually assaulted. “I have not,” Rotunno answered, “because I would never put myself in that position.” Twohey was stunned; the conversation suddenly took on a different tone. Rotunno’s response is a textbook example of the ways that privilege blinds people to reality. It must be comforting to believe that you haven’t been raped because you’re just too darned smart to be raped, but it’s also delusional, not to mention hugely condescending to legions of sexual-assault victims who never requested their trauma.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 9, 2020****/****, 1940s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Stairway to Heaven
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw Watching 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death while the end of the American experiment is upon us is an amazingly painful thing. The film was conceived in part by hyphenates Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as a way of cementing the postwar British-American alliance. Accordingly, it ends with a trial in which the United States is celebrated as an inspirational model: a paragon of idealism, humanism, truth. If it ever was those things, it isn’t any of them today. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the movie now plays as an elegy for everything we’ve lost since 1946–for everything I’ve lost as I bid goodbye to what remains of my innocence and my optimism that there’s anything left in this country that resembles what I had been raised to believe about it. We are divided, hateful, unhealthy, selfish, stupid, and brutal. There’s a line from Graham Baker’s underestimated Alien Nation I think of often nowadays. Alien immigrant Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), drunk one night, tells his human friend:

Sundance ’20: Luxor

February 6, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Egypt, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK

***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes, Sherine Reda
written and directed by Zeina Durra

by Walter Chaw In Zeina Durra’s Luxor, Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a British surgeon in Luxor, Egypt on a short leave between horrific assignments first in devastated Syria, then in Yemen. She’s shell-shocked, it’s clear. She spends her days wandering through the ancient city and allows herself one night to be picked up in her hotel’s bar by an unctuous Yank throwing his money around. She lies in her hotel room for hours, trying to nap, and when she does sleep, she wakes to find herself another day closer to some sort of hell. Durra captures her listlessness as a feeling ineffable of being lost but never lost enough. Hana sits by herself at the far left end of a park bench, arms folded across her chest and a baseball cap pulled down low over her stunned expression. She visits a pyramid one day, just another tourist, and overhears a tour guide giving the yokels a taste of the gravid mysticism they’re paying for. It all lands as empty for Hana. Hana, who doesn’t have anything left inside after all this time bearing witness to the absence of God.

Sundance ’20: Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness

February 6, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Iran, Luxembourg, Satire, Sundance, Switzerland

*/****
starring Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee
written and directed by Massoud Bakhshi

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes into Massoud Bakhshi’s shrill Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (hereafter Yalda), I put my hands over my ears to blunt the constant keening. It’s also the point where I started wondering what this film was on about. There’s something brilliant and fascinating at the core of Yalda–a movie about an Iranian variety/game show in which the fate of someone sentenced to death hangs on the forgiveness of one of the people they’ve wronged–that makes its hamfistedness a real pity. Gathered are what we might call the plaintiff and the defendant to sit in an “Ellen”-style talk-show nook to tell their stories and air their grievances and then let the audience deliver a verdict via text message, whether or not a blood-money bounty will be paid to the aggrieved should they decide to exercise some grace. That’s horrible. It’s not more horrible than the U.S. justice system, which offers no such opportunity of recourse for the accused (heaven forbid a Christian nation ever exercise forgiveness and actually value life), but it’s horrible just the same.

Sundance ’20: This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

February 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Italy, Lesotho, South Africa, Sundance

***/****
starring Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makheta, Makhaola Ndebele, Tseko Monaheng
written and directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

by Walter Chaw In Lesothan hyphenate Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's debut film This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (hereafter Burial/Resurrection), the fate of a village, soon to be drowned as a casualty of a government dam project, weighs heavily on elderly widow Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo). Mantoa's striking visage suggests an octogenarian Beckett photographed by Jane Bown, perhaps, the lines on her face describing a road map of the places she's been. Her sorrows include a lost husband, child, and brother–to a mining accident, illness, and misadventure, respectively. The one thing tethering her to the ground is the village's cemetery, where all her hopes are interred. The film's introduction, a slow crawl through what vibes as a jazz club as an old man (Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha) sits playing his Sotho lesiba (which makes music that sounds a little like a dirty-water trombone) in counterpoint to his slam poetry-like incantatory recitation of the movie's themes, the whole of it working like nothing more than a grand invocation to the muse. Burial/Resurrection is film as epic poem, and it has moments of truly staggering power. Power it only really loses when it cuts too quickly, cleanly, back to the narrative of the film itself. What would it have been like had it leaned harder into being a stream of images?

Honey Boy (2019) + The Lighthouse (2019)|The Lighthouse – Blu-ray + Digital

February 4, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Mystery

HONEY BOY
***½/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
written by Shia LaBeouf
directed by Alma Har’el

THE LIGHTHOUSE
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw There is a suggestion in Alma Har’el’s haunted, raw Honey Boy that the only knowledge forbidden in the United States is that of the self. The picture aligns in that way with Robert Eggers’s similarly haunted The Lighthouse; both films deal in a sense with the sins of the fathers becoming the secret trauma of the sons. They diverge, though, not in the process of peeling away layers and layers of sedimentary fragments the everymen of these dramas have shored against their ruins, but in what they discover at the end of their excavations. To my depressed hope, the final image of The Lighthouse, which promises this cycle of suffering is evergreen, ever-returning, and inevitable, sounds something like the truth. At the other pole is Honey Boy, which, in the course of one of its fantasy sequences, offers, of all things, reconciliation. It says that there’s hope at the end of all the suffering, that the map actually leads to buried treasure and not just the skeletons of the things left to guard it (their ranks are full but they’re always recruiting). I’m not sure I’m compelled by the case it’s trying to make, particularly as this story has more to tell, but there’s a power to its piquant grace and love and acceptance.

Sundance ’20: The Evening Hour

February 3, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

***/****
starring Philip Ettinger, Stacy Martin, Cosmo Jarvis, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Elizabeth Palmore, based on the novel by Carter Sickels
directed by Braden King

by Walter Chaw Everybody likes Cole (Philip Ettinger, the suicidal environmentalist from First Reformed), and for good reason. Cole is young, handsome, pleasingly brawny, appears to genuinely enjoy his job at the old-folks home, and takes care of his grandmother (Tess Harper) and demented-and-fading-fast grandfather (Frank Hoyt Taylor). As it happens, his grandfather looks a little bit like my late father-in-law, who was taken by dementia a couple of years ago at the beginning of one of the more bleak periods of my life. The way Cole reacts when he learns that plans are being made to move his grandfather into more structured care feels familiar and true. When Braden King's The Evening Hour is best, it's for how lived-in everything feels. Elizabeth Palmore's screenplay, an adaptation of a novel by Carter Sickels, sounds good and right in the mouths of these actors. I do wish it had eschewed its criminal subplot in favour of more, well, flavour, but even in its MacGuffin, find embedded modern bogeys like financial desperation, the opioid epidemic, and a broken healthcare state. Weighty stuff, and The Evening Hour handles it with agility and charm.

Sundance ’20: Beast Beast

February 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, Teen

*½/****
starring Shirley Chen, Will Madden, Jose Angeles, Courtney Dietz
written and directed by Danny Madden

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Slacking around in the common area shared by Elephant, Madeline's Madeline, and Skate Kitchen, Danny Madden's message-heavy melodrama Beast Beast would've been better served just being about the difficulties of adolescence without wading into the gun debate. Once this pretty decent hangout flick tries to gain some gravitas, it invites close scrutiny of the ways it's going about it. One side will start looking for reasons to discredit it, while the other will be burdened by this uneasy recognition that sometimes, undisciplined good intentions make the struggle harder. There's a fine line between a cogent argument, after all, and The Life of David Gale, and Beast Beast is further evidence that liberals tend to be their own worst enemy. It's too bad.

Sundance ’20: La Leyenda Negra

February 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, Teen

*/****

starring Monica Betancourt, Kailei Lopez, Irlanda Moreno, Justin Avila
written and directed by Patricia Vidal Delgado

by Walter Chaw Shot in black-and-white, Patricia Vidal Delgado's La Leyenda Negra is filled with good intentions. It's the story of El Salvadoran Aleteia (Monica Betancourt), a high-school senior studying with a "Temporary Protected Status" that's about to be rescinded under Trump's xenophobic, white-nationalist administration. She has a scholarship to UCLA, the film is quick to remind, but she still has to make it through graduation. Easier said than done when her school's curriculum seems set on teaching antiquated attitudes towards imperialism and the genuine evil of nations that have devastated whole populations in the name of Manifest Destiny. There's a classroom scene where Aleteia corrects her white teacher's pronunciation of her name before laying into her for perpetuating the party line. Aleteia is meanwhile developing a crush on Rosarito (Kailei Lopez–a budding star, perhaps), a shy girl in the sway of a monstrous bully, Monica (Irlanda Moreno), who does not approve of potentially losing an acolyte to the interloper.

Sundance ’20: Summer White

January 31, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sundance

Blanco de Verano
**½/****
starring Adrián Rossi, Sophie Alexander-Katz, Fabián Corres
written by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson & Raúl Sebastián Quintanilla
directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson

by Walter Chaw Aspiring for something like The 400 Blows with a young protagonist who looks and acts like 15-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson’s directorial debut Summer White seeks to explain the pain and occasional outbursts of a young man coming of age without the means to express himself. The film’s style lies somewhere at the intersection of early Harmony Korine and Ken Loach: it’s aggressively not-showy–so devoted to its austerity and so accomplished in achieving it, in fact, that its aesthetic humility becomes a kind of distraction. It looks beautiful. Maybe too beautiful. It looks like an Y Tu Mamá También while acting like a Ratcatcher or a Kes, and reconciling that dissonance begins to feel difficult. In the end, what disappoints most about Summer White is that I started to question whether the film wanted to be something for its own sake or if it was just something done by someone who’d seen a few Linda Manz movies and thought she was really great. I mean, she is, of course. Linda Manz is awesome.

Sundance ’20: And Then We Danced

January 28, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Georgia, Romance, Sports, Sundance, Sweden

***/****
starring Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, Ana Javakhishvili, Kakha Gogidze
written and directed by Levan Akin

by Walter Chaw I don’t know that Levan Akin’s beautifully-shot, sensitively-performed And Then We Danced does anything especially novel, but it lands everything it attempts. That’s an apt metaphor, I think, for a film about an elite Georgian dance troupe that ends with an audition where our hero, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), Curt Schilling-bloody-socks his way through a gutsy routine. It plays out a lot like the audition in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria reboot in all its physicality and injury fear/revulsion, just as the rest of it plays out like Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name in the broad strokes of its gay coming-of-age melodrama. And Then We Danced is derivative, sure, but at least it’s derivative of the right films.

Sundance ’20: La Llorona

January 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Guatemala, Horror, Sundance

***½/****
starring María Mercedes Coroy, Margarita Kénefic, Sabrina De La Hoz, Julio Diaz
written by Jayro Bustamante & Lisandro Sánchez
directed by Jayro Bustamante

by Walter Chaw In a film comprising indelible compositions, one in particular stands out in Jayro Bustamante’s doom-laden La Llorona. It’s not a supernatural tableau, although the film is thick with them, nor is it one from a devastating war-crimes trial where an old Guatemalan general, Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), stands accused of unspeakable atrocities visited upon Mayan women during a horrific, early-’80s pogrom against them. No, the moment that lingers for me is a brief one where a new maid in the General’s household, Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), kneels beside a giant backyard pool and fishes protest flyers out of the water as a frog swims laconically past. The sequence itself captures the mild surreality of a picture set against a sociopolitical reckoning with an ugly period in Guatemala’s history. The General and his family rattle around in a mansion, surrounded by tokens of their affluence. Our first night with them, long-suffering wife Carmen (Margarita Kénefic) is mistaken for a ghost and shot at by the great man, and their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), a doctor only now coming to learn of the crimes of which her father’s accused, also discovers that his facilities are, perhaps greatly, diminished.

Sundance ’20: Black Bear

January 24, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

**/****
starring Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon, Paola Lázaro
written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Lawrence Michael Levine (Uncle Kent 2) ventures into Darren Aronofsky territory with his insular, solipsistic Black Bear–the kind of movie that actually deploys “solipsistic” as a word to develop its two female leads: one uses it, the other pretends not to know what it means. It’s a game that sophisticates play with one another, I guess, and Black Bear, split into two loosely-related halves, is also a game sophisticates are playing with one another, or at least with themselves. In the first segment, co-producer Aubrey Plaza is Allison, a movie director renting a room in a cabin in the woods from a bickering couple, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). Blair is pregnant, Gabe is insufferable, and the two of them spend a lot of time arguing about whether or not women had it better in the 17^th century, when they were the property of men. (It’s one of those arguments Jordan Peterson makes because Jordan Peterson is an incredible asshole.) So they fight, and Allison is caught in the middle. They also bicker about whether or not Blair should be drinking wine while she’s pregnant, and then Blair goes completely apeshit and says that Allison’s pussy probably smells like “spider shit.” It might be an improvisation, which is really something if it is–and really something if it isn’t.

Gemini Man (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 14, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Will Smith

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we’re attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film’s prologue, it’s stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee’s Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It’s kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories–like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It’s considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that’s stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it’s poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the “you just need an egg!” explanation. Better if said explanation were that they’d figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

Underwater (2020)

January 11, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwyck, T.J. Miller
screenplay by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad
directed by William Eubank

by Walter Chaw Wasting absolutely no time and not interested in talking to you about it, William Eubank’s Underwater is both a model of efficiency and a prototypical post-modernist piece wholly reliant on your familiarity with this genre for its depth and backstory. A seasoned viewer knows that this film is going to be about a small group of survivors picked off one-by-one; that the real bad guy will be corporate greed (or Russian greed, depending); and that if you’re African-American or, God forbid, Asian, you’ll very likely be the first to go. Curiously, it’s in these aquatic thrillers that key exceptions to that rule–Ice Cube in Anaconda, for instance, or LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea–seem to make their appearance. Maybe the trick to surviving the monster is being a late-’80s rapper. Alas, Mamoudou Athie is not a late-’80s rapper. He plays Rodrigo, friend of plucky engineer Norah (Kristen Stewart), and it’s at his urging that Norah saves their deep-sea drilling platform to initially survive a mysterious event–and then through his noble sacrifice that Norah gets to continue to be heroic. It’s worth dwelling on this conceit, but there’s no time: once the dust settles on the disaster that opens the film, several other disasters follow in rapid succession.