In a Violent Nature

In a Violent Nature (2024)

June 28, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Lauren Taylor
written and directed by Chris Nash

by Walter Chaw Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is wonderful on a technical level, but I’m suspicious of its motives. The best you could say about it is that if it likes slasher movies, it likes them for what seems like many of the wrong reasons; and the worst you could say is that maybe it doesn’t like slasher movies at all. At best, it doesn’t understand them and, because of that, doesn’t respect them. And because of that, I had a feeling it was mocking them–like being caught in an awkward conversation with someone explaining something you love back to you as something they think is, at its heart, a silly distraction. (Or, in this case, a vacuous dispenser of cheap thrills.) I suspect In a Violent Nature‘s primary influences were not, despite a few superficial call-outs, Twitch of the Death Nerve or Halloween or even the more atavistic Friday the 13th saga, a series commonly misread as shallow and puerile. No, what it most resembles is Gun Media’s asymmetrical third-person, open-world Friday the 13th survival game from 2017, which allows you to play as hockey-masked Jason Voorhees while a camera follows you over your right shoulder, Dardenne Brothers-style. The difference is that the video game has Jason’s mother’s voice urging him on, coddling him with warmth when he’s dispatched another victim, thus giving him a constant prod to engage in various, fruitless attempts to be a dutiful son, the desired offspring of a lost parent. The video game, in other words, sees the slasher as a vehicle at some level for exorcizing mental disturbances caused by abandonment and unrequited love for a parent. In a Violent Nature is essentially the feature-length version of that brilliant Geico commercial where a group of twentysomething idiots eschew a running automobile and hide behind a wall of chainsaws in a well-lit kill shed instead.

Comer and Butler in The Bikeriders

The Bikeriders (2024)

June 27, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon
based on the book by Danny Lyon
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw It’s hard to feel sorry for men, because the tragedy of so many of them is that they are only able to express themselves through violence. Our culture fetishizes violence, genders it male, and admires men who enact it while pathologizing those incapable of expressing themselves productively. Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is another of his films about men trapped inside repressive systems: punished for their intuition, for tenderness and kindness, for love, for heaven’s sake. His films aren’t complicated, but in their romantic simplicity, they can be dazzlingly, emotionally complex. What causes brothers to fight at their father’s funeral? A man to mortgage everything he has to build a storm shelter? Another to ferry an unusual boy he fears he can’t protect across the country to the care of people who can? Nichols’s films are the stories of us all as victims of our hardwiring, whether it’s you who stands before me or me who can’t get out of my own way. They are elegies because there are few happy endings for men who choose violence or the people who would like to forgive them even when they’ve done nothing but keep the gentle parts of themselves encased in sinew and rage. I wanted to disappear inside The Bikeriders.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Inside Out 2 (2024)

June 15, 2024Posted in2024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Pixar, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein
directed by Kelsey Mann

by Walter Chaw Inside Out 2 hasn’t resolved any of the issues I had with the first film, which boil down to if I’m meant to treat this conceit seriously, then you should probably treat it seriously, too. I grew up with Judy Blume and can’t recall a single instance in her books where a young girl’s emotional development was a playground for cheap gags and high concepts. The sequel’s plot is inane, of course: Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman) goes into puberty around the time of summer hockey camp and experiences the complexities of self-doubt, self-loathing, and anxiety attendant to adolescence. All her thoughts and actions are retrofitted around the decisions made by a cadre of anthropomorphized emotions as they battle for supremacy over a TARDIS-like control centre located somewhere, it seems, in Riley’s frontal cortex. The stakes are elevated because Riley is a vulnerable young woman, not because she’s an especially well-developed character. Because she’s blonde, blue-eyed, and adorable, every little thing that doesn’t go well for her is cause for people raised in this culture to tsk and worry. I would go so far as to say the stakes are outsized for what this is, i.e., a nonce of a nothing-burger, precisely because we are hardwired to cherish this species of porcelain vessel independent of any personal knowledge of her. She is a pinnacle of a cultural ideal, and if she is troubled, we are troubled.

If

If (2024)

May 27, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Steve Carell
written and directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw The message of John Krasinski’s excruciating If is that you are never too old to have an imaginary friend–or, rather, you will never be so old that you won’t need an imaginary friend. Let’s all just sit with that for a minute. Work it around in your head. You will never…be so old…that you won’t need…an imaginary friend. Is that a warning? A promise of mental decline? Is the innocence and happiness of childhood synonymous with having an imaginary friend? The presumption is that imaginary friends are good things and that everyone has had one, you see, and one of the tragedies of growing up is that you forget your imaginary friend. Except there’s this adorable little Asian kid (Alan Kim, already needing a new agent) who doesn’t seem to have one for some reason, so I’m already starting to lose the thread that’s connecting this world. Do all kids have imaginary friends except Asian kids? Why is that? Is it a cultural ban? A deficiency? The fuck is going on? Another premise in If is that once kids forget about their imaginary friends, they disappear–except they don’t disappear, they’re still there but invisible to their former childhood pals. Bea (Cailey Fleming, who is great; this is not her fault) can see them, though. Bea is afraid she’s about to be orphaned. Bea is possibly a monster. Maybe there aren’t rules in If. Maybe it’s madness or hallucination, a psychedelic freakout or, better yet, a true sequel to the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone”, which I know did have a sequel, but here’s another one. Work with me here.

Or did they see Prince's ghost? (Stars of I Saw the TV Glow bathed in purple,)

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

May 9, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical

****/****
starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Helena Howard, Danielle Deadwyler
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have a summer evening inside me, a particular one, a purple one. It’s almost dawn, and the sidewalk is warm beneath me. I’m lying there staring at the sky pushing into dawn; it’s the last day of my life. I feel like I’m still there sometimes. I left enough of myself there that I’ll always be there. I’ll never leave. I don’t remember much of my life up to and including high school. It was a confusion of sensation and shadows. I hold shame and sadness in a cage with my heart and won’t let them out. But I remember this night, because it was the day I tried to kill myself. There are times I think I didn’t fail and that all of these decades since have been a moment between breaths. I can smell the moss phlox growing by the street if I concentrate. What if this ends soon? I will blink awake and be there on the warm concrete, waiting for the last sun to rise, and maybe that would be alright. Maybe it would be alright when the stars fade into the blue of day. Maybe it would explain why everything, all this time, has felt so strange, and why that clean, wide-open night has always been so close to me.

Oh, no! Two vampires!: Zendaya getting a double hickey in Challengers

Challengers (2024)

May 7, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
written by Justin Kuritzkes
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Challengers feels…what’s the word, is it “coy?” It’s a tease, a jape, a roundelay and a smug one. It promises the world and delivers a quintessence of dust: a movie about tennis where the balls are blue. The best part is near the end, when two once and future lovers consider each other from across a swirling maelstrom–a scene of heightened emotions right there on the verge of magic realism that reminded me of better movies like Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday and even Bronwen Hughes’s wildly underestimated Forces of Nature. What a pity the resolution to said scene is a heatless tumble in the backseat of a beater. It’s possible that consummation in the sexual sense is meant to take a backseat to ecstatic metaphor–that fucking is secondary to dazzling cinematography and a sweaty clinch in front of an adoring crowd. That would explain why the non-tennis sequences are equally sparkless: the two-thirds of the book you skim to get back to the good bits. Off the court, it’s an irritating, underwritten melodrama played by two fantastic actors and one who purses their lips and concentrates a lot, husky-whispering like late-career J-Lo when trying to convey seriousness. The one who seems altogether unworthy of the attentions of the other two points on this love triangle, so that any hint of romantic suspense has fled. Of course the boys should be together: the boys are the sexy ones in perpetual heat. What are we even doing here?

'Cause I'm the Unknown Blunt-Man: Gosling and Blunt in The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy (2024)

May 4, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham
written by Drew Pearce
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I watched David Leitch’s The Fall Guy the same way I try to spot a particularly well-camouflaged insect in a terrarium: with a little disgust, a little fascination, a little fear of the uncanny. You know when you know something’s there but you can’t see it? Could be the terrarium keepers are playing a trick, though, right? Could be there’s just a stick in there. By all accounts, real people made and executed The Fall Guy, but who can tell these days without some kind of Voight-Kampff detector? The film is ostensibly based on the classic five-season run of a Lee Majors television show I watched religiously as a kid, though I only retained the theme song (“Unknown Stuntman,” performed by Majors himself), so naturally, I rewatched the entire first season of it to rekindle my crush on Heather Thomas and confirm there’s no real connection between it and the film. The movie does seem to share some elements with Richard Rush’s cult classic The Stunt Man (1980), but it eschews the naked paranoia and strident social commentary. It shares some cosmetic elements with Robert Mandel’s F/X (1986) and its underestimated sequel (F/X 2 (1991)), too. Ultimately, the best analogue in terms of how weird it feels is John McTiernan’s meta-movie Last Action Hero (1993), only without the relative cleverness of a concept higher than “stuntmen do stunts.”

Dunst in Civil War

Civil War (2024)

April 5, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw Haskell Wexler’s seminal 1969 film Medium Cool opens on a car accident. A woman in a grey-and-black striped dress has been thrown from the passenger side and is lying in the road. The car horn is stuck and blaring, and in the rearview mirror two figures approach: a man in a tight black T-shirt toting a 16mm camera, and his soundman, trailing behind with a directional microphone. They stalk around the wreckage. They find the best angles. The guy with the camera–the hero of the piece, John (Robert Forster)–spares a moment of pity for the woman after getting his footage. He and the soundman leave, and we hear distant sirens. They’re travelling, John and his colleague (Peter Bonerz), across a country torn by unrest at the end of the last progressive period in the United States–the wasteland our season of assassinations left behind, in which any vestiges of hope would soon curdle into the filth of Altamont and the Manson Family. They’re chroniclers, not participants. What is a single human lifespan compared to the life cycle of the perfectly eloquent photograph? What if you could keep telling your story after you died? What if the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where the party fractured over disagreements about how to handle an unpopular war and sent Chicago’s stormtroopers to beat students and protestors… What if this happened and no one was there to record how far we had fallen? What if the powerful were allowed to operate in the dark?

Watch this space

Spaceman (2024) + Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)

March 15, 2024Posted in2024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Streaming

SPACEMAN
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Colby Day, based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
directed by Johan Renck

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING
**/****
starring Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia DeBonis
written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead
directed by Rachel Lambert

by Walter Chaw Its basic set-up is like Duncan Jones’s Moon: a lone astronaut, far from home and tethered only by occasional contact with the partner he’s left behind on Earth, finds some solace in conversations with an alien/artificial intelligence. But this genre of listless Rocket Men and their internal melodramas traces back to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, right? Or that 1964 episode of the original “Twilight Zone”, “The Long Morrow”? Apocalypse-tinged futureworlds centred around Byronic heroes. Where its antecedents rarely showed the strain of their creation, however, Johan Renck’s Spaceman (an adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia) often does. It has good taste, and maybe even the right idea in putting a man in isolation in order to Altered States him into a cleaner understanding of his essential self, but it’s better at pounding out the notes than it is at hearing the music. While I didn’t hate it, I am, I suspect, squarely in its target audience of pretentious, sad, The Fountain-loving Proust-readers, so it never drowned me like I hoped it would. Me, whose pockets are always filled with the smooth rocks I picked along the shore.

Dune Part Two (2024)

Dune Part Two (2024)

February 29, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:”
–Genesis 3:14

Fanaticism is a closed circle, maddening because it’s impregnable, maddening because it destroys everything in the process of building itself. It’s a riddle without a solution, and once you’ve drunk deep the plasma spring, it’s a long way back–if you ever get there. There are people who “deprogram” cult members, but I don’t buy it, you guys. I’m of the belief that when you’re gone, you’re gone. You went by choice, after all. You denied your ears the beeswax but didn’t tie yourself to the mast. My mom bought into a cult for the last several years of her life. She held on to it tightly, and it gripped her right back. I suppose that’s one of the appealing things about cults: when you find the right one, you join the company of a great many people who agree with you. If you’re broken in some way, if your awareness of that has made you lonesome and alone, that must feel good. I take a little bit of the blame for her susceptibility to such things. I was a terrible son to her. Maybe she needed something to hold that would hold her back; I did, too. I found it in a wonderful wife and kids. She found it, some of it, in a cult that finally accepted her. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know what I believe. Maybe this is just narcissism–mine or hers, I don’t know either. But she’s dead now, and I’m the only one left to wonder about what happened between us.

Perfect Days (2023)

February 1, 2024Posted in****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Japan

Perfectdays

****/****
starring Kôji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Tomokazu Miura
written by Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) notices little things. Like the sunlight dappling the trees. Or the doomed sproutling, too close to its mother to survive, pushing its way out of the ground. He gestures at the park’s caretaker, asking if it would be all right for him to rescue the plant, and carefully transplants it to a piece of newspaper he’s folded into a cup. Hirayama works for Tokyo, cleaning its network of public toilets. He listens to his collection of ’60s and ’70s music on cassette tapes in his municipal van–dark blue, same as his jumpsuit, the colour playing counterpoint to The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” which provides the soundtrack for our first ride home with him during magic hour. (I have to imagine the character of Niko (Arisa Nakano) was not accidentally named.) Once he returns to his spartan flat, he plants the sapling in a pot and puts it in a room full of its spiritual brothers and sisters at various stages of thriving. Hirayama goes to his favourite restaurant stall in the subway, then a bathhouse, where he soaks and listens to other men converse. Then it’s off to bed reading Faulkner. The first lesson of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is that it is possible to live a full and beautiful life, at least for a while, in a small space: watered, fed, warm, cared for…and wanted, though it isn’t clear at first that anyone is thinking about Hirayama.

The Holdovers (2023) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

January 9, 2024Posted in****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.

Afire (2023)

December 18, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Streaming

Afire

***½/****
starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Walter Chaw In their fetishization of hopelessly pretty women on bicycles. there is a hint of Claude Chabrol in Christian Petzold’s films; and in their obsessive deconstructions of interpersonal interactions, a touch of Arnaud Desplechin. Both echoes are filtered through a specifically Teutonic social brusqueness that reminds me now of Paul Verhoeven’s early Dutch thrillers. Petzold’s latest, Afire, is, in other words, a wonderland for film nerds looking to engage in another of this filmmaker’s beautifully wrought bits of cinematic nostalgia, though I confess Afire flayed me close to the bone more for its depiction of a lumpen, lachrymose writer named Leon (Thomas Schubert) than for its rich, multi-textural references. (It’s Ozon that Petzold most resembles, isn’t it? Or is it countryman Fassbinder, the master of the social-realist melodrama?) The picture opens with Leon and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) driving to Felix’s father’s house in the woods by the ocean when their car breaks down. Wandering along a trail, Leon asks if they’re lost, and Felix, in response, sprints deeper into the forest with promises to scout out the road ahead. “It can’t be far!” he says. Afire sets itself up immediately to be a folk-horror movie where Felix never comes back and Leon is left to fend for himself against cultists or witches or wildlife. But Felix does come back, and all those immediate feelings of dread linger like a chill over the remainder that no amount of the film’s wildfires can completely chase away.

Eileen (2023)

December 9, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Eileen

***/****
starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland
written by Luke Goebel & Ottessa Moshfegh, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
directed by William Oldroyd

by Angelo Muredda Thomasin McKenzie gives the armpit-sniffing Mary Katherine Gallagher a run for her money as the eponymous weirdo loner in William Oldroyd’s Eileen, an admirably icky take on the Ottessa Moshfegh novel of the same name, adapted by the author and her partner, Luke Goebel. An awkward, horned-up femcel, Moshfegh’s Eileen is the kind of ostensibly normal but secretly maladjusted creep you’d find in a Patricia Highsmith novel–as relatable as she is perverse. While Highsmith’s work has lent itself to any number of successful treatments (including Carol, the film this one most closely resembles in its melding of pulp and queer desire), Moshfegh’s text is less of an obvious sell for the movies, fixated as it is on its protagonist’s unruly gut feelings, which frequently extend to her actual bowel movements. While Eileen, with its lovingly upholstered retro-1960s aesthetic, is a tidier affair than the novel, it’s to Oldroyd’s credit that he realizes something of its shabby outlook on the human experience, where violence is your best, if not only, ticket out of your crummy small-town New England existence.

The Holdovers (2023)

December 4, 2023Posted in****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

Theholdovers

****/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.

Saltburn (2023)

November 26, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Saltburn

*/****
starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

by Walter Chaw People keep expressing in the weariest, archest way how disappointing Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) has turned out to be, or, if they’re more passive, how they do hope he doesn’t end up like the last one–you know, that one; why do they all end up that way? Well, who wouldn’t snap under that kind of aristocratic disapproval, I ask you? It’s like if Jay Sherman’s butler caught you nicking from the buffet table. And indeed, all of Emerald Fennell’s insufferable Saltburn is like The Talented Mr. Ripley written by Fleabag–if Patricia Highsmith and Phoebe Waller-Bridge were trying to follow up an underbaked piece of shit with another underbaked piece of shit while producers were still bedazzled by her empty, shit-eating bullshit. Sorry, I mean to say Saltburn is hackwork that doesn’t know what it’s trying to say because Emerald Fennell, a member herself of the larded gentry, isn’t remotely self-aware enough to recognize the extent to which she’s completely bought into her systemic privilege and its attendant noblesse oblige. Yes, good Queen Emerald has a story to tell about how bad her people are. Now listen up, peon.

Napoleon (2023)

November 19, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK, War

Napoleon2023

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett
written by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw I wish Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was weirder, kinkier, as perverse as it seems like Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the diminutive emperor, wants it to be. I wish it had more time for his relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), who, in this incarnation, is cast as a kind of succubus: a barren nymphomaniac who pulls up her bloomers and spreads her legs during her courtship with Napoleon and tells him if he looks at her holiest of holies, he’ll never stop wanting it. It’s deeply weird, is what I’m saying, and there’s a version of this film that is just ninety minutes of these two actors, ready for anything, going full-tilt boogie. Maybe he puts on a dog collar, and she steps on him; then he goes out and murders a few tens of thousands of Egyptians while firing cannons at the Great Pyramids. In that Napoleon, however, we wouldn’t see the million-dollar battle sequences, but instead a series of disturbing tableaux vivant of codependency and sadomasochistic sex play ending in the same title card tallying up the number of people who died (over three million) because of this creepy little freak. “Him?” we would marvel–and then consider that maybe it’s only damaged men, damaged in exactly this way, who would consider the military conquest of the world a thing to be desired, possible to accomplish, and more, possible for them to accomplish. But, alas, that’s not the sort of movie Ridley Scott makes.

May December (2023)

November 17, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

Maydecember

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
screenplay by Samy Burch
directed by Todd Haynes

by Angelo Muredda “You just don’t know with these Hollywood types,” Julianne Moore’s wilted Southern belle Gracie says early in Todd Haynes’s intricate hothouse melodrama, May December. She’s referring, by way of a throwaway reference to a prior encounter with Judge Judy, to the impending visit at her idyllic Savannah, Georgia home by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV actress who’s about to play her in a movie about the defining event of her life more than twenty years prior. Gracie is a tabloid celebrity, famous for her exploitative sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy, for which she served time in prison. Improbably, she’s also a proud matriarch, having married and built a home with her victim, Joe (Charles Melton), who now finds himself an empty nester at the ripe age of 36, as the couple’s twin children, born while she was in prison, prepare to go off to college. Loosely inspired by the story of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau, who went on to marry and start a family with the victim of her abuse until their separation in 2019, May December isn’t a work of true crime so much as a playful, sly, tonally restless exploration of Gracie’s observation about the unknowability of Hollywood folks, which turns out to be broadly applicable to the unfathomable nature of everyone, including herself and her partner.

SDAFF ’23: Day Off

November 13, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

Sdaff23dayoff

Ben ri gong xiu
本日公休
½*/****
starring Lu Hsiao-fen, Fu Meng-po, Annie Chen, Shih Ming Shuai
written and directed by Fu Tien-Yu

by Walter Chaw Fu Tien-Yu’s Day Off is heartfelt pap in the Garry Marshall style: soft-focused, episodic, sprawled like a drunken floozy across a flight of stairs in a Tennessee Williams melodrama. It’s a movie scored, every inch of it, with the kind of music honey and treacle would make if they had sticky little tentacles. The film is insinuating, probing for soft spots to geek for uncontrollable emotional gag reflexes: dying fathers, generational trauma, reunions, separations, triumphs… You know that minor chord you learned in your first guitar lesson? Think about a sad day and play that chord. Play each of the strings individually. Slowly. Close your eyes. You want a job, kid? Day Off is genuinely awful. It shares a personality with Precious Moments figurines. Moreover, it shares a vibe with the lonesome old lady you somehow got trapped in a conversation with who is shoving her Precious Moments figurines in your face and asking what you think. “This is A Decade of Dreams Come True, isn’t it sweet? And this is My Heart Beats For You, isn’t that adorable? ISN’T IT?” It isn’t. It’s sad, a lonesome transference of underdeveloped and frustrated social longing onto a plaster mold of literal children pretending to be adults.