Drama Archives - Page 3 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Napoleon (2023)

November 19, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK, War

**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, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

***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, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

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.

SDAFF ’23: The Secret Art of Human Flight

November 10, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito, Maggie Grace
written by Jesse Orenshein
directed by H.P. Mendoza

by Walter Chaw Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer) isn’t doing very well. He writes children’s books with his wife (Reina Hardesty), but she just died of an allergic reaction; all those arguments they used to have seem so stupid now. H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight is about being grateful for what you have while you have it–which isn’t novel, you’ll agree. One night, while doom-scrolling through TikTok, Ben watches what appears to be footage of a guy killing himself but is, in fact, footage of a guy who has taught himself to fly, blasting off from the edge of a cliff. Why he needs to jump in order to fly is what I think liberal arts majors call a “metaphor.” Also a metaphor is how Ben gets on the Dark Web to buy the multi-step process through which he, too, might learn to fly. What he doesn’t know is his five grand is buying the personal attention of flight inventor Mealworm (Paul Raci), who, with a combination of unctuous Peter Coyote cult-leader charisma, puts Ben through his paces. It’s that kind of movie.

SDAFF ’23: In Water

November 7, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

물안에서
Mul-an-e-seo
***/****
starring Ha Seong-guk, Kim Seung-yun, Shin Seokho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately, It’s the time of year when he died, and though I’m terrible with dates, my body seems to remember. I usually think my moods must have something to do with autumn and the change in the weather–but I love the autumn, the smell of rotten leaves, the halo around the moon, the chill. And then I remember. Korean master Hong Sang-soo reminds me of my dad, too. It’s how he’s so irritatingly self-assured, I think. So mulishly iconoclastic. My dad never really listened to anything anyone else told him. Sometimes that worked out for him; often it didn’t. But the path of his life was defiantly his. My dad was learned, extraordinarily well-read in books written in languages I can’t read, and tortured. He’s been gone twenty years this year. Is it the “china” anniversary for death, as it is for marriage? Are the traditions the same, or do we fail to memorialize loss in the same way? My dad’s death is almost old enough to drink. When I was much younger, I would ask him big questions–life, the universe, everything–and he would answer with quotations and philosophies: aphorisms, fables, poems. I don’t remember anything about them except that they made me feel frustrated, mocked a little, and left to worry my thoughts alone like a cat with a tail of yarn. And now he’s gone.

SDAFF ’23: Cobweb

November 6, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

거미집
Geomijip
**½/****
starring Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Song Kang-ho
written by Kim Jee-woon, Yeon-Shick Shin
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw Kim Jee-woon is such a fine technical director that, for a while, the slapdash of his behind-the-scenes, Living in Oblivion insider piece feels like a meticulously orchestrated machine where every piece hits its mark instead of what I think is intended: silly slapstick arising from sloppy improvisation. There might be a path charted for this picture, but it all plays a little like Calvinball. What I like least is how many edits are timed to various shrieks: the last refuge of the desperate and the wayward. Screams of comic frustration, screams of theatrical fear, screams of manufactured ecstasy, screams of the righteous artist at war with a corporate machine trying to grind him down. Such is the plight of Kim (Song Kang-ho), a director labelled as a peddler of pop “content” who, wounded for the last time by a table of smug film critics, rewrites the ending to his latest endlessly-replicable soaper and, swimming upstream, seeks to wring two extra days from a fickle cast under the nose of state regulators suspicious about the sudden change in direction in a state- approved and financed picture. Kim Jee-woon handles the meta, film-within-a-film conceit by shooting Director Kim’s magnum opus in Universal Horror black-and-white while leaving his studio-bound escapades in vivid, drawing-room colour. The picture he’s making looks to be a Hitchcockian thriller of some kind–a metaphor for the labyrinthine cobweb the truly inspired must navigate in order to realize their vision.

SDAFF ’23: Monster

November 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

****/****
starring Ando Sakura, Kurosawa Koya, Nagayama Eita
written by Sakamoto Yûji
directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda is a keeper of secrets, a guardian of hidden things and a priest of the ritual of childhood. Watching his stuff feels like an invitation into intimate spaces, and I can’t shake the feeling, however impossible, that they’re places I’ve been before. I recall, for instance, a little half-loft built into the silversmithing store my father used to own. When I was too young to work or too tired from working, I’d climb up into it to read, or sleep, or peep down onto the sales floor, where customers would mill in and out. I hadn’t thought at all of that tiny vantage, a crow’s nest floating above a turgid sea of confused nostalgia, until I saw Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, which, of course, has nothing to do with silversmithing stores or fathers who have journeyed past the horizon or boats unmoored and lost in listless seas.

Priscilla (2023)

October 26, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Italy, Music, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Dominiczyk
based on the book Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley with Sandra Harmon
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola takes a lot of heat for making movies about what she knows. This strikes me as peculiar, because I don’t really have any desire to see a Sofia Coppola film about, say, enslaved African peoples. But one about a rich little girl lost? Yes, please. It seems, in fact, that what Coppola is doing as an author is the kind of thing generally celebrated with auteur theories and canonization. I wonder why she’s been popularly singled out as a creator who’s failed to checklist minority groups outside her own. What would the reception of her remarkable remake of The Beguiled have been like had she foregrounded the enslaved African American character and attempted to write her through the lens of Sofia Coppola’s experience? Was her eliding of the character seen as whitewashing, was that the problem? How was the character treated in Don Siegel’s version? How do the Oscar-winning depictions of enslaved African Americans in Gone with the Wind fare? I wonder if the cries for Coppola to have more diversity in her films is a disingenuous complaint driven primarily by a general dislike of Coppola because she’s some combination of a woman and a nepo-baby who doesn’t seem the least bit interested in catering to a larger audience. I wonder why Jean Renoir didn’t get crucified for the same thing. Honestly, I don’t wonder.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 22, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror

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

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy
based on the novel by Ira Levin
written for the screen and directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw Rosemary is everything. He’s just Guy. It’s that tension–between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table–that serves as the tightrope in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. As portrayed by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is precious and flawed, full of life and surrounded by death. She is the venerated object, the cathedral she imagines the night she’s drugged and violated; the most precious thing, the sanctified earth planted with the pestilential corruption of masculine ambition. Rosemary’s Baby opens with a lengthy consideration of the buildings that surround Central Park like vultures in their priestly black, voracious and solemn, gathered around a carcass that is, in this configuration, the sole hint of life in a metal savannah. Polanski is a genius of architecture and the consideration of it. His spaces are predatory, or at least become so: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” and the apartment that sprouts hands from its walls and, here in Rosemary’s Baby, the “Black Bramford.” He puts pretty blondes into the maw of his constructions–sacrifices to the Minotaur wandering through his Labyrinth–and watches them get swallowed by the Stygian black. He is the Minotaur. The pitch is his, along with the appetites. Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest films about what women endure in a world that sees them as seed incubators, nesting fowl, and finally trophies: meek and pretty. But Rosemary isn’t meek, simply outmatched, surrounded, flanked by the men she’s supposed to be able to trust.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

October 19, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

**½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw I think Martin Scorsese is perhaps too principled a filmmaker to indulge in the dark poetry of Killers of the Flower Moon; too bound by limitations he’s aware of and wary of violating, too respectful of the horror of the history to mark it with the crackle of verve and vitality. A sober topic deserves a sober treatment, no question, yet Scorsese at his best is doing lines off the hood of a vintage Impala, not running lines with actors and advisors, all with competing interests and hardwired biases, to find the most cogent, most reasonable way to approach a tripwire. He’s so careful not to set off the powderkeg that is the Osage Murders of 1921-1926 that he doesn’t set off any sparks at all. While I don’t think Scorsese is capable of making a bad movie, with things like Hugo and even The Irishman, he’s shown he can make movies that are enervated in the fatal way of a conversation you have with a beloved elder you’re lucky to engage with but dread, too, for the repetitiveness and dusty formality. I’m not saying Scorsese was the wrong person to adapt white-guy journalist David Grann’s NYT-feted true-crime book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a celebration of an organization that has done grievous harm to these very people it swooped in belatedly to protect this one time. On the contrary, he’s told what is probably the most palatable version of that story–but it’s a story I don’t want to hear. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time investing much in devalued institutions and their saviours.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

October 13, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire

Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
**/****
starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux
screenplay by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

by Angelo Muredda Puberty is a vampire in Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a stylish but flimsy debut that has little to say on the subject of either depression or vampires in spite of its title. A likeable, low-stakes coming-of-age allegory about the growing pains of being an outsider (among other barely scratched subjects), the film slots in nicely next to spooky-adjacent young adult romances like “Wednesday” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, for whatever that’s worth. It also makes a nice calling card for Louis-Seize’s likely future in franchise television, her comic world-building better suited for a sitcom with genre notes than a feature, where her characters are reduced to the sort of easily summarized traits that would make them stand out in a pilot.

The Creator (2023)

October 2, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney
screenplay by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Fifty-three minutes into Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, there is a “What is Heaven?” talk between a hardened American soldier broken by grief and regret and a little Asian kid who happens to be a potentially world-destroying cyborg. The cyborg asks the question, and the G.I. says it’s where people go when they’re turned off, then clarifies that he won’t be going there because only good people get into Heaven. The A.I. then observes they have something in common, as it, too, will be denied entrance to Heaven as a non-person and, it goes without saying, non-Christian. I think this is maybe a critique of Christianity, which believes that the 69% of people on this planet who do not share their beliefs will literally burn for an eternity in a lake of fire. Or perhaps it’s a critique of American exceptionalism that believes we have the corner on morality, even as the country’s engaged in vicious dynastic colonialism and has been since its conception. Mostly, and accidentally, it’s a meta-critique of how whenever white creators seek to get all dewy-eyed about trans-humanism (see: Cloud Atlas), they tend to use Asian bodies as the battleground for their philosophical evolution, thus exposing a bias that should probably be examined with the help of non-white creators involved in the decision-making process. Why is it, they might ask these science-fictional advisors and creators, that when you talk about spiritual thought-leaders who transcend this mortal plane, the first thing you think of is a magical, mystical Oriental? Think hard.

TIFF ’23: Seagrass

September 28, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ally Maki, Luke Roberts, Nyha Breitkreuz, Chris Pang
written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown

by Bill Chambers I always brace for gloom when out come the tiny title fonts–in Canada, they’re the cinematic equivalent of a funeral director solemnly gesturing towards the casket–but Meredith Hama-Brown’s FIPRESCI-winning Seagrass quickly dispelled my cynicism by being so obviously good. Judith (Ally Maki) and Steve (Luke Roberts) are a mixed-race couple with two young daughters, 11-year-old Stephanie (Nyha Breitkreuz) and six-year-old Emmy (Remy Marthaller). Theirs is a troubled marriage, complicated by the recent death of Judith’s mother, and so they’ve travelled with the kids to a couples retreat on the Pacific coast for therapy and respite. There, they meet their mirror image in Pat (Chris Pang) and Carol (Sarah Gadon), handsome marrieds who appear to be farther along in their reconciliation. (Either that, or they’re better at presenting a united front.) Judith regards Pat with undeniable yet enigmatic interest and Steve picks up on it, creating a lopsided tension between the two men. But gradually, from the nature of Judith’s complaints about Steve–how he never wants to go anywhere exotic; how he doesn’t seem to appreciate the depths of her grief, or comprehend her nostalgia for a childhood that sounds like it was mired in hardship–it becomes clear that whatever her physical attraction to Pat, he’s thrown Steve’s whiteness and all that that implies into stark relief. (Because it’s set in the 1990s, unenlightened Steve falls easily into syllogistic traps like asking how he could be a racist when he has a Japanese wife, while Judith lacks the language of rebuttal.) She looks at Pat and wonders, perhaps, if an Asian partner would make her feel less conspicuous. Less ashamed. Less alone.

Telluride ’23: Daddio

September 21, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn
written and directed by Christy Hall

by Walter Chaw Girlie (Dakota Johson) gets in a cab from JFK to Manhattan, and over the long drive through construction slowdowns and other diversions, she and driver Clark (Sean Penn)…talk. Girlie receives a few lewd texts from her lover, sure, but Clark praises her for how little she’s on her phone in this age of screen intermediaries. He’s surprised again when she wants to know his name: “You are a human being,” he says, and there’s hardly anyone who could deliver this line the way Penn does: free of insinuation or sarcasm, hinting at emotions like gratefulness and even flattered surprise. Penn is one of our great “face” actors. Robbed of tools other performers rely upon, he won an Oscar for Dead Man Walking, where he spent most of his time behind a glass partition, shackled to a table. The four inches reflected in the rearview mirror in Daddio are a better actor than almost anyone who’s ever done this. His persona outside of film has outgrown him in many ways, but I was shocked by how glad I was to be in his company again. Penn’s large humanitarian gestures and vile history of abuse, spotlighted whenever he shares his unevolved and indeed apparently devolving Neanderthal viewpoints on women and consent have obscured his accomplishments as an actor. Perhaps rightfully so. Seeing him on a big screen again made me realize how much I’d missed him in this context–and how much I wish it were the only context in which I knew him.

Telluride ’23: All of Us Strangers

September 19, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, UK

****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn’t, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they’d reject me again for everything I could’ve helped and everything I couldn’t. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn’t have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it’s okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: “A long time ago” doesn’t matter when you’re talking about terrible things. “Oh,” the man says, and quieter, “oh.”

TIFF ’23: Evil Does Not Exist

September 17, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Music, Thriller, TIFF

悪は存在しない
Aku wa sonzai shinai
***½/****
starring Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani
written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Angelo Muredda Evil is a big-city land developer running a roadside Zoom meeting with his gormless staff about the fastest way to turn a self-sustaining village into an anonymous corporate glamping site in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. An ice-cold followup to the more reassuring awards darling Drive My Car, it’s a remarkable slow-burn thriller about the human capacity to look away from the downstream effects of our disruptions to natural equilibrium, dressing that violence up in HR-friendly euphemisms the ecosystems we’re poisoning couldn’t care less about.

TIFF ’23: Seven Veils

September 16, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O’Brien
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Atom Egoyan hits his stride again in Seven Veils, a playful and self-reflexive backstage drama about the re-staging of a Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, which Egoyan, lover of complicated matryoshka-doll narrative structures and intertextuality, has twice mounted for the same company, first in 1996, then in February of this year. Footage from both of those versions becomes the obscure scene of the crime in the film, where director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, reuniting with Egoyan after the underrated Chloe) is in the challenging process of remounting a production previously directed by her mentor and apparent groomer Charles, who integrated cryptic home movies of her ritualistic abuse at the hands of her father into the original work–video elements that, of course, were also foregrounded in Egoyan’s stagings of the opera. While Jeanine is wrestling personal and professional demons to get the remounting into shape and dealing with her conservative minders at the COC, who’d rather she discard her aesthetic changes and relegate her incendiary director’s note to a blog or a podcast (where, you can almost hear Egoyan snickering, it’ll never be heard), props master Clea (Rebecca Liddiard) is documenting her behind-the-scenes work on her humble iPhone, inadvertently capturing another sex crime that makes her both a survivor and a potential power player.

Telluride ’23: Nyad

September 13, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride

*/****
starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, Johnny Solo
screenplay by Julia Cox, based on the book by Diana Nyad
directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

by Walter Chaw Film festivals are expensive and not profitable. They underpay their staff, which mostly comprises volunteers and a nomadic group of technicians who follow festivals around the country like roadies on an eternal tour, and they suffer from the need to please their wealthiest supporters, who, for the most part, have more money than taste. Certainly, they have more desire to be coddled than hunger for risk-taking. That’s why, every year at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the country, there’s an entry like thrill-seeker documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl’s Oscar-bait biopic Nyad. Last year it was Empire of Light, and the year before it was King Richard, and the year before that it was Judy. In 2017, there was that Battle of the Sexes thing about Billie Jean King, the only one I’ve mentioned to get zero traction at the Academy Awards. Each of these movies is as functionally formulaic as a suppository: machine-tooled and well-lubed, with only one measure for its success or failure. It either wins the middlebrow’s greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn’t know how to begin to answer that question. Is a suppository good? I dunno, man, I don’t spend much time thinking about a capsule I shoot out of my ass annually around this time of year.

TIFF ’23: I Don’t Know Who You Are

September 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Mark Clennon, Anthony Diaz, Nat Manuel, Michael Hogan
written and directed by M.H. Murray

by Bill Chambers Toronto scenester Benjamin (Mark Clennon) is a young, Black artist and musician getting his groove back after breaking up with his boyfriend and performing partner, Oscar (Kevin A. Courtney). He’s a sweetheart, the sort of guy who sends what little spending money he has back home to his mother and makes ends meet giving music lessons to kids and empty-nesters around the neighbourhood. He’s also a bit of a raw nerve: When his friend Ariel (Nat Manuel) teases him for not having slept with current beau Malcolm (Anthony Diaz) yet, she unwittingly sets off his insecurities about Malcolm’s desire to take things slow. So begins a Friday night of heavy drinking that finds Benjamin running into Oscar, who’s settled into a new relationship with ease. At first, then, it’s a cheap boost to Benjamin’s ego when a stranger (Michael Hogan) starts hitting on him on the way home, but soon the stranger’s predatory intentions come into stark relief and Benjamin, too rubbery from wine to fight him off, is raped. The next day, instead of calling the police, going to the ER, or confiding in friends, Benjamin does something that feels psychologically acute in its irrationality and starts cleaning the fridge. I Don’t Know Who You Are is at its best in these moments that defy exposition, and in fact there’s an entire other movie happening, unspoken, about what, exactly, Benjamin’s race means within his obviously inclusive but conspicuously white inner circle. One friend describes him as “our jukebox,” which maybe isn’t the compliment they think it is. (Benjamin points out that, unlike him, jukeboxes get paid.) His rapist is white, too, incidentally–and billed as “The Man.”

Telluride ’23: The Zone of Interest

September 11, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Poland, Telluride, UK, War

****/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth
screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw A real sense of evil permeates every nook and cranny of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which is an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel in the same way Glazer’s Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Farber’s novel. That is to say, one of tone and mood that discards all but the broadest strokes of the original premise. If Glazer applied the same process to this film as his previous one, he let the mysterious currents of his intuition guide his hand across the text. He is the philosopher as artist, an anthropologist locating himself in a human blind and documenting the mysterious movement of the dark as it oozes from one crooked and low place to another. I don’t know how he finds the threads he pulls, but his fingers must be more sensitive than mine. I also don’t entirely understand how he sneaks toxins past my defenses, desensitization, and tolerances: the draft you can never locate after the first freeze of a long winter locks you in place. Glazer isn’t interested in moralizing, in trying to understand, even contextualize, how an ordinary, upper-middle-class military family in The Zone of Interest can owe their existence to mechanized genocide and feel no call to conscience. He doesn’t see his characters as so complex they defy binary judgment; he sees them as so mechanical and simple they defy binary judgment. The universe tends to comfort. It’s a fool’s mission to impose systems of understanding on the ant Isserly beholds at the beginning of Under the Skin. Trying to do so could drive one to madness. Trying to do so says more about you than it does the ant.