Drama Archives - Page 26 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Ghost Story (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

February 8, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the terrifying best-selling novel by Peter Straub
directed by John Irvin

by Walter Chaw Jack Cardiff’s reputation as a world-class cinematographer began, really, with the Archers, progressed through Hitchcock’s underestimated, and gorgeous, Under Capricorn (every inch as beautiful a film as Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death), and was maintained in collaborations with the likes of John Huston, Joe Mankiewicz, King Vidor, and Henry Hathaway. He did two films with John Irvin: the great Dogs of War, and this, 1981’s seedy, singularly unpleasant Ghost Story, which represents the final screen appearances of Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Melvyn Douglas. I think the biggest disappointment of the film is that it doesn’t look better, given Cardiff’s behind the camera. In fact, it looks like a TV movie (acts like one, too, as it happens); the possibilities of having Cardiff lens a classic ghost story in the gothic style are delicious and, until the last ten minutes or so, largely frustrated. Blame the picture’s settings, various brightly-lit exteriors and contemporary environments (office buildings, college campuses)–even when the movie is in a grand old house, our aged heroes’ Chow-duh Society huddled together in pools of shadow, scaring each other with spooky stories, the joke seems to be that someone is always turning on the lights.

Hail, Caesar! (2015)

February 6, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/****
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

The Finest Hours (2016)

January 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Eric Bana
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, based on the book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw Craig Gillespie makes a play to be the new Ron Howard by not only following up Ron Howard’s waterlogged maritime tale of dashing Captain Handsome and his feats of historical derring-do with his own, but also studiously crafting bland, empty, crowd-pleasing, middlebrow gruel for the sedate appreciation of people who are almost dead. Gillespie’s is The Finest Hours, the tale of a heroic small-boat Coast Guard rescue in 1951 off the coast of Nantucket that sees four really boring white guys putting out during a storm to save thirty waterlogged oil-tanker guys. The Finest Hours never for a moment made me not think of that SNL sketch where Mark Wahlberg asks a goat if it’s seen A Perfect Storm–which admittedly is not the worst thing that a film hasn’t been able to make me not think about.

Code Unknown (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 2016****/****, 2000s, 2016, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Romance, Romania, The Criterion Collection

Codeunknown1

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Sepp Bierbichler, Ona Lu Yenke
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer In the vignette that opens Code Unknown, a young girl in pigtails, maybe 9 or 10 years old, cowers against a plain wall, trembling before director Michael Haneke’s static camera. If you know Haneke’s work–his previous film at the time, Funny Games, had depicted the torture and murder of a bourgeois French mom and dad plus their fair-haired moppet–the image is more than a little disturbing. But Haneke immediately pulls the rug out. Rather than cry, the girl suddenly stands and smiles, looking expectantly towards the camera. Haneke then cuts to reverse angles on different children, in close-up, also looking towards the camera. The girl has an audience, and so we understand that she was giving a performance. In this case, it’s a game of charades among deaf children, with the spectators attempting to guess, using sign language, what the girl was trying to convey. “Alone?” one girl signs. The girl in pigtails shakes her head. Another signs, “Hiding place?” No. Nor is she trying to convey “guilty conscience,” “gangster,” “sad,” or even “locked up.” In the face of so many impassive classmates, the girl in pigtails finally looks weary and maybe on the verge of tears for real. With that, the screen goes black, and the title appears: Code Unknown.

Concussion (2015)

December 26, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Peter Landesman

by Walter Chaw Peter Landesman's deeply compromised Concussion so shockingly exposes and excoriates the negligence of the NFL in protecting its players that it's constantly advertised during NFL games. The whole thing feels like a redacted security document: It's choppy, skips over entire plot points, short-sells the issues, and gives equal time to celebrating the beauty and the glory of football as it does to how football turns a scary percentage of its players into confused, manic, suicidal zombies. Save for a few minutes spent with Pittsburgh Steelers centre Mike Webster (David Morse), living in a truck and gluing his teeth into his head with superglue, we don't get much of a glimpse at the symptomatology of "CTE," the repeated-trauma disease discovered by Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who's introduced listing off his accomplishments to declare himself the "smartest person you've ever probably met or will probably ever meet." Concussion is what Spotlight would have looked like had it been made by Cardinal Law: you know, some stuff happened, but the Catholic Church is MAJESTIC. To be fair, we don't get much of a glimpse of anything–not even the romance between Omalu and his ward-cum-lover-cum-spouse (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so astonishing in Belle and Beyond the Lights; welcome to the mainstream, Gugu!), which is treated in a curious, epileptic shorthand. She's a homeless refugee. She's very religious. Oh, now they're dancing and, um, fucking, and married and, wait, pregnant and married. Wait, now she's doing that wife-in-Bridge of Spies thing where she's protecting the family and… And Concussion is terrible.

Joy (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw After demonstrating with his last few movies that he’s not Martin Scorsese, David O. Russell has decided to kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating that he is neither Wes nor P.T. Anderson, either. In Joy, he proves that marrying Wes Anderson’s whimsical solipsism with P.T. Anderson’s Pynchon-esque biographical sketches is an amazingly stupid thing to do–one of those science experiments in ’50s B-movies that everyone knows is a bad idea except for the idiot doing the splicing. Yes, Joy is that bad. When it’s not being unbearably twee, it’s perving on Jennifer Lawrence like von Sternberg on Dietrich. But Joy ain’t no Blue Angel, and while I like Lawrence fine, I guess, Russell is sure as hell no von Sternberg. What I’m saying is that Russell is a terrible, glitchy director with a thing for Lawrence that he manifests by shooting her walking towards the camera with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with a wig and without a wig, in slow-motion or at normal speed, in daytime, nighttime; he lights her with the sun, with spots, with discretes, from below, and especially from behind–all in a kind of PENTHOUSE glamour. The only part of Joy that isn’t unwatchable is a sequence shot precisely like identical sequences in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, where an obviously tense Bradley Cooper, playing QVC programming director Neil Walker, shows the titular domestic goddess Joy (Lawrence) around the studio. I take it back, those were pretty bad, too. The only thing preventing Joy from being the worst movie of the year is that Pixels happened.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Blind Chance (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 15, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Drama, Poland, The Criterion Collection

Przypadek
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Marzena Trybala, Monika Goździk
written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

by Bryant Frazer Before Krzysztof Kieslowski became the standard-bearer for the latter-day European art film with ravishing portraits of unspeakably beautiful women living their lives under unutterably mysterious circumstances, he was a gruff but adventurous chronicler, in both documentary and narrative films, of lives lived in the rather more drab surroundings of communist Poland. Well, money changes everything. It was the arrival of funding from Western sources that bestowed the gift of abstraction: Beginning with the internationally celebrated The Double Life of Veronique in 1991, it made Kieslowski’s expressions of ennui beautiful. But in the 1980s, Kieslowski had less time for beauty.

Macbeth (2015)

December 10, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Shakespeare, Theatrical, UK, War

***½/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis
screenplay by Todd Louiso & Jacob Kokoff and Michael Leslie
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw In a season awash in Terrence Malick shrines, Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth has the temerity to evoke Andrei Tarkovsky instead. Maybe certain moments from Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, married to the saturated minimalism of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. It’s beautiful, in other words. Stunning enough that its self-consciousness is just another approach to centuries-old material, and a comfortable part of the whole. There are two approaches left to Shakespeare, I think: to acknowledge the centuries of intense scholarship around the canon that has uncovered the archetype (mostly Jungian, sometimes Freudian) mooring the tales, or to ignore them. This Macbeth understands that the Scottish Play is splashed red–all passion and portent and looming storms flashing low on the horizon. Every incident is portent. I mumbled along with the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech that I memorized for extra credit in eighth grade and marvelled at how Kurzel rolled it into a greater thematic conversation about the lust between these two people, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard). It’s as interesting an interpretation as Ethan Hawke’s Melancholy Dane pondering choices in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. Muting the dialogue, swallowing it as Fassbender does here (or burying it, as in the various battleground sequences–Banquo (Paddy Considine) calls out his warning choking on blood and dirt), has the effect of placing the words of the story as secondary to its indelible images. It’s Macbeth as mythology, seeking to explain how eternity metastasizes in the space between a couple who have lost a child.

San Andreas (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 29, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Sanandreas1

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Carlton Cuse
directed by Brad Peyton

by Bryant Frazer Back in the 1970s, Hollywood thrillers broke a sweat trying to depict a single terrible event–just one burning building, overturned luxury liner, or airship disaster. These days, the imagery has gotten a lot more freewheeling. Armed with powerful computer algorithms that generate cartoonish eruptions of earth, fire, wind, and water, today’s VFX supervisors have a mandate to make bad things happen on screen–all of the bad things, preferably at the same time. In San Andreas, the terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day includes a disintegrating Hoover Dam and a container ship that cartwheels end-over-end into the Golden Gate Bridge. Skyscrapers collapse in on themselves, generating 9/11 flashback clouds of dust and debris that blast through city streets. A tsunami and its attendant flooding sends murky water pulsing through the floors of submerged high-rises, trapping helpless victims inside like goldfish behind glass. It would all be a little hard to take if the visual effects were more convincing (they’re cartoonish) or the action scenes at all naturalistic (ditto), but director Brad Peyton isn’t especially ambitious. His operative aesthetic is purely Theme Park.

Creed (2015)

November 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Stallone, Theatrical

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises not to spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

October 19, 2015****/****, 1970s, 2015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Japan

****/****
written by Yoshiyuki Fukuda, Eiichi Yamamoto, based on the novel La sorcière by Jules Michelet
directed by Eiichi Yamamoto

by Walter Chaw The completion of Osamu Tezuka's "Animerama," a trilogy of early-'70s erotica initially imagined as a tie-in to that era's "pink films" that eventually applied their boundary-testing to its own form and function, Belladonna of Sadness is the only one of the three pictures to, ironically, feature no direct involvement from Tezuka. Instead, longtime collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto takes the reins and, in this loose adaptation of a non-fiction tract on witchcraft and Satanism, produces the headwaters for everything from hentai to Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. It's a template that parallels Ralph Bakshi's dabbling in ani-porn, a thing that runs on evocations of Roman Polanski in not just its function and form, but also the drawing of its heroine, Jeanne, as the very image of Sharon Tate. The fate of pretty blondes is a primary concern of Polanski's in this period–no less so enacted through this saga of a woman, raped and humiliated before, in the end, like Yeats's Leda, she takes on the power of her patriarchal tormentors to exact precise, poetic vengeance.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Short Films

October 16, 2015****/****, 2015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Short Films, Sweden, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw

The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera–the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise–a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum–is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.

Crimson Peak (2015)

October 14, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Jim Beaver
written by Guillermo del Toro & Matthew Robbins
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I love Guillermo del Toro. I love the ethic driving Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone and the Frankenstein and Pinocchio myths driving Mimic. I love the Prodigal Son of Blade II, the ferocity, of course, and vision of Pan’s Labyrinth, and all of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, my favourite of his films; every frame is wonder. I didn’t like Pacific Rim but I did think it was at least all-in and there’s something to be said for that. And now here’s Crimson Peak, which is just, you know, really bad and for no one. I have a friend who referred to del Toro’s book version of The Strain (I’ve never read it) as arrogant. I didn’t understand that, but it tickled during Pacific Rim and has found full flower now in Crimson Peak. There’s a point at which someone who is an expert in something can go from teacher to pedant. What begins as a conversation, nurturing and full of joy, becomes patronizing and solipsistic. I myself probably crossed over years ago. Now I have company. Del Toro at his best shares what he loves. At his worst (and Crimson Peak is del Toro at his worst, by a long shot), he believes that he’s talking over your head. You couldn’t possibly understand. You’ll never catch all his references, he says. And suddenly the party’s over and he’s all by himself in his self-aggrandizing echo chamber of curiosities.

Bridge of Spies (2015)

October 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Drama, Espionage, Spielberg

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda
screenplay by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Steven Spielberg is the great Hollywood pastry tube. He’s packed to the brim with sugary, awards-season sweetness, and he extrudes little nuggets of prestige with the greased regularity of a lifelong prune-eater. In his latest bit of machine-tooled calculation, Bridge of Spies, he makes the unintentional statement during his patented unforgivable epilogue that the American public is a disgusting, moronic, animalistic mob ruled by prejudices and the media (which is the foundation of a different, good movie on the subject of Bridge of Spies)–ironic, because it’s those very deficiencies in critical discernment, moral certitude, and sophistication that Spielberg has made a cottage career of taking advantage of. If it’s true that all films manipulate but we only complain when they do it poorly (and it’s more true than not), then let me complain that Spielberg is an absolute visual savant–proof of it in the first ten, wordless minutes of Bridge of Spies (compare it to the wordless section of Amistad)–and an absolute pandering whore in his inability to deliver an ambiguous ending. He’s said as much. He’s the only living director who could turn out a masterpiece from a Philip K. Dick short story and ruin it with a sunshine double-happiness lollipop of a ridiculous Hollywood ending. But have no fear: Bridge of Spies never threatens to be a masterpiece for even a moment. It’s no Munich or Saving Private Ryan–more like The Terminal. Bridge of Spies is decrepit, highly-polished garbage from almost the beginning, with no relief from its elderly ministrations all the way through to the end.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Sensoria

October 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Sweden, Thriller

**/****directed by Christian Hallman by Walter Chaw Swede Christian Hallman's first feature, Sensoria, sports a couple of nice, creepy moments but ultimately adds little to the "we have always been here" subgenre of haunted-house movies. In this iteration, Caroline (Lanna Ohlsson), freshly single and lamenting that her circle of friends consists largely of digital phantoms offering ephemeral support through social media, discovers that her new bachelorette pad is maybe haunted by the ghost of a little dead girl, My (Norah Anderson). Not helping her isolation and increasing paranoia are a pervy landlord and a dotty old lady of the kind that…

A Brilliant Young Mind (2015)

October 3, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Theatrical, UK

X+Y
½*/****
starring Asa Butterfield, Rafe Spall, Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan
screenplay by James Graham
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Walter Chaw Reminding most of Camp in that it's ultimately more of a zoo for curiosities than an invitation for empathy, here's A Brilliant Young Mind, which posits, among all the Rain Man things it posits about autism, that the Chinese, besides being good at backflips, are very good at math. For the Chinese, you see, math is like art. It says so in this book that was written over the course of a thousand years. For the type of audience that gets off on those Olympics puff pieces where the Chinese are portrayed as opportunistic monsters who sell their children to the national team, it's a special sort of Eurocentric auto-flattery. The implication, see, is that although you're about to lose to the Chinese, they're still morally inferior to you. The Chinese, you understand, don't love their children. And they're good at math. Also, they're sexually naive, you know, because it's not like Asia is horrifically over-populated or anything. Later, a British guy quotes Keats in relation to how if truth is beauty and beauty is truth, then math must be the most beautiful thing of all. It's that kind of movie. The kind of movie with a score of industrious violin pulls and ambitious, then sad, keyboards. It has a moment where the evil dragon uncle of the Chinese mathlympians shouts, in perfect Mandarin, "What are you two doing?" and the film translates it as, "Are you in a relationship?" It's that kind of movie. You'll like it if you're that kind of person.

Mississippi Grind (2015)

October 2, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn, Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton
written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

by Walter Chaw Completely adequate from start to finish, Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck's Mississippi Grind is essentially California Split without the stylistic innovation or sense of sadness and danger. In it, down-on-his luck gambling addict and self-proclaimed "not a good guy" Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) runs into bon vivant gambling addict Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), who Cheap Thrills Gerry into a series of escalating gambles before whisking him away on a journey to the Big Game. There's a tremendous scene right in the middle with a loan shark played by the great Alfre Woodard that showcases both her immense warmth and her sudden steel. There's also a whore with a heart of gold (Sienna Miller) and a winsome epilogue that suggests, The Wrestler-like, that this big, lovable, broken-down lug just can't get out of his own way, gosh darn it–isn't that a shame? It is. It's a terrible shame.

TIFF ’15: Full Contact

September 27, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Croatia, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Grégoire Colin, Lizzie Brocheré, Slimane Dazi
written and directed by David Verbeek

by Walter Chaw Brilliant if often a bit too on-the-nose, Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek's Full Contact takes on the state of modern man by detailing America's drone war. I heard a thing on NPR a while back talking about how the traditional metric of tracking a battle group's efficiency by tallying its loss-to-kill ratio has been blown of late by drone groups that have thousands of kills to zero losses. It's an existentially frightening situation in which Nintendo skills not only predict military success, but also potentially engender the same sort of desensitization regarding the tactile obscenity of murder. The movie's title is a clue to its intentions, then: Verbeek follows drone captain Ivan (Grégoire Colin), sequestered away in a bunker somewhere in Nevada where he pilots drone aircraft, bristling with munitions, into somewhere in the Middle East, the better to assassinate tagged targets. He communicates via live messaging and a headset (the way a kid on an Xbox 360 might, essentially), and one day, though he suspects better, he hits a target that turns out to be a school. Outside, he befriends a stripper, Cindy (Lizzie Brocheré), telling her he's impotent although he's not.

TIFF ’15: The Family Fang

September 27, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jason Bateman

by Bill Chambers David Lindsay-Abaire is the poor man's Tom Stoppard and Jason Bateman smothered whatever vulgar charms his directorial debut Bad Words may have possessed in an incongruous autumnal burnish, but they have a neutralizing effect on each other: Together, the strained seriousness of the former and the preposterous seriousness of the latter (Bateman shoots this one like The Godfather) create a curiously palatable harmony. The Family Fang is every inch The Skeleton Twins or some other brother-sister Sundance yarn but with a wonderfully specific source for the siblings' dysfunction: raised by performance artists, they were from a young age incorporated into their parents' notorious act, which tended to prey upon the sympathies of innocent bystanders. (In a very funny early flashback, for example, they stage a mock bank robbery that ends in the alleged shooting death of matriarch Camille Fang (Kathryn Hahn here, Maryann Plunkett in present day).) As adults, Buster (Bateman) and Annie (Nicole Kidman, looking supernaturally restored to her Peacemaker days) have distanced themselves from their past and channelled any lingering impulses towards exhibitionism into the more legitimate avenues of writing and acting, respectively. When Buster is shot in the head with a potato (don't ask), he is summoned home and drags Annie with him to serve as a buffer. Back in the family nest, father Caleb (Christopher Walken) immediately tries to rope them into a "piece," but not only have they moved on–so has society at large, now too insular to be a viable canvas for the Fangs' art. Walken's fury as he quits a prank involving counterfeit coupons is poignant; one senses a touch of the actor's own frustration with the world no longer appreciating his unique genius.