Drama Archives - Page 9 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’21: Earwig + Night Raiders

September 23, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

EARWIG
***½/****
starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers
written by Lucile Hadžihalilović & Geoff Cox
directed by Lucile Hadžhalilović

NIGHT RAIDERS
***/****
starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Gail Maurice, Amanda Plummer
written and directed by Danis Goulet

by Angelo Muredda Parenting and being looked after are the stuff of nightmares in Lucile Hadžhalilović’s genuinely creepy curio Earwig, which is as visually and aurally arresting as it is inscrutable. A cryptic dance between a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) and his ten-year-old charge, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), the film charts their ritualistic and mostly unspoken interactions in a dingy apartment, making us tense witnesses to an unexplained paternal science experiment conducted under the all-seeing eye of a supervisor who phones in his instructions from offscreen, apparently to prepare the girl for whatever is lying in wait for her. That’s about all we know, though Hadžhalilović skillfully hangs this threadbare plot on indelible images while evoking our primitive stirrings of anxiety for the future. No small feat, given how little dialogue there is.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

September 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on his stage play with songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
directed by Stephen Chbosky

by Walter Chaw Dear Evan Hansen is the Canadian-girlfriend grift, emerging from insecurity and good intentions–that mythological girl from a place far enough away for high-school kids that it might as well be Narnia or Middle-Earth, whose phantom existence affirms you are not as pathetic and alone as you really are. And when your Canadian girlfriend dies by house-fire or moose misadventure, perhaps there’s a vein of pathos to be mined there for whatever profit grief allows. It’s the illusion of depth for an immature, troubled, frightened kid, common enough that the “Canadian girlfriend” has entered the pantheon of urban fairytales. How ’bout if Dear Evan Hansen had been about the social pressures that harangue Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) into exploiting the death of a deeply unbalanced and complete stranger instead of how Evan Hansen’s own terminal thoughts and attempted suicide forgive his sociopathic manipulation of a grieving family and school community? Aye, there’s a movie for you–the one where Evan Hansen is a victim and not the hero, and the bad guy is not the truth of his unforgivable deception being discovered, but the overwhelming stricture to conform that weighs especially heavy on adolescents. The sneakiest thing about Dear Even Hansen is that at the end of it all, it’s not actually okay that Evan is an outcast. The premise itself is the bully.

TIFF ’21: Dune

September 21, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, TIFF

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn’t get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert’s Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book’s story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn’t experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You’ve arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it’s not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called “Caladan”–that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called “Arrakis.” It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it–return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it’s why I’ve read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don’t actually want to know what’s inside the Monolith.

TIFF ’21: The Good House

September 20, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney
screenplay by Thomas Bezucha and Maya Forbes & Wally Wolodarsky, based on the novel by Ann Leary
directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky

by Bill Chambers Earlier this year, I revisited 1995's Copycat, in which Sigourney Weaver plays an agoraphobic criminologist assisting the police in their hunt for a serial killer who arranges tableaux in tribute to famous murderers of the past. It's the sort of B-movie in A dress they don't make anymore, an exuberantly tasteless piece of crackerjack filmmaking that made me wistful for medium-budget, middle-class movie-movies that exist for their own sake. But, perhaps because her most iconic roles are so heroic (this is a woman neither gorillas, nor xenomorphs, nor Bill Murray himself could cow), Weaver's brand doesn't bend towards powerlessness without showing the strain. I thought then and still think that Weaver was miscast as a woman who hyperventilates into paper bags in Copycat. Similarly, her character's reluctance to admit she has a problem with alcohol in The Good House seems as much informed by pride and social stigmas as it does by certain firewalls in Weaver's persona. Hildy Good (Weaver) is a real-estate agent in Wendover, Massachusetts (actually Nova Scotia). It's a small coastal town and she worries what her neighbours think of her, especially considering word-of-mouth affects her livelihood. Maybe that's why she's had her struggles with booze, because of the pressure of maintaining a reputation. Booze, of course, never helped anybody's reputation.

Telluride ’21: The Lost Daughter

September 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Greece, Telluride

****/****
starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jessie Buckley
screenplay by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante
directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw Leda (Jessie Buckley) is brilliant. She's translating Auden into Italian and, more than just translating, she's interpreting the work in a way that's exciting to other scholars. She so impresses a hotshot in the field, one Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard), that he seduces her during a conference–or she seduces him, cheating on her milquetoast husband and two young daughters. She abandons all of them eventually. It's a decision that haunts her. At least it should, though she's not so sure it does. But that was a long time ago. Leda (Olivia Colman) is now 48, vacationing by herself on a tiny beachfront in Italy. These days, she's an English teacher of no particular renown looking for a small patch of ocean to float in, a small stretch of sand to lounge on, food when she's hungry, and a bed when she's tired. There's this other family, however, consisting of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who's struggling with a difficult child and a husband, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who looks like bad news. Though maybe not as bad-news as Toni's sister, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who, seven months pregnant, wants to take a swing at Leda when Leda refuses to give up her umbrella for Callie's birthday party. The cabana boy, Will (Paul Mescal), spots this and tells Leda he admires her for it but also warns her against doing it again. "Why?" she asks. "Because those are bad people." When she's walking home that afternoon, a large pine cone falls out of a tree and punches a small hole in Leda's back.

TIFF ’21: Benediction

September 16, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK, War

***½/****
starring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda Queer melancholia and stifled antiwar resistance collide in Terence Davies’s Benediction, a luxurious and achingly blue profile of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. Ever the personal filmmaker no matter the period he’s recreating nor the artist he’s profiling, whether it should be Emily Dickinson (A Quiet Passion) or himself (Of Time and the City), Davies finds the perfect irascible surrogates in Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the younger and elder Sassoon, respectively. The one is vital but in danger of being flattened by military hypocrisy and transient love affairs with a rotating cast of men doomed to early deaths and loveless marriages, while the other has settled into his surly senescence, despite a late-in-life turn to Catholicism in search of some kind of permanence. (“You could get something unchanging from dressage without the guilt of Catholicism,” sniffs his son.)

TIFF ’21: The Humans + Lakewood

September 16, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

THE HUMANS
**½/****
starring Richard Jenkins, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, Amy Schumer
screenplay by Stephen Karam, based on his play
directed by Stephen Karam

LAKEWOOD
*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Sierra Maltby
written by Chris Sparling
directed by Phillip Noyce

by Bill Chambers Richard Jenkins leads an all-star cast as the nightmare-plagued patriarch of the Blake family, who have gathered for Thanksgiving at the new home of daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun): a duplex in the middle of Chinatown that’s falling apart, Polanski-style, in symbiotic echo with the dysfunctional Blakes. Erik (Jenkins) and his wife Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) have been keeping something from their children that’s bound to sting, while their other daughter, Aimee (a dynamite Amy Schumer, which is the film’s biggest surprise), is intent on protecting the dinner table from the life-altering medical prognosis she’s received. Then there’s Erik’s mother, Momo (June Squibb), who sits in a wheelchair muttering in a secret language between brief periods of lucidity. It’s a long day’s journey into night in which truths are laid bare but none of the characters experience catharsis, since all this TMI does is create space between them–and more room for their personal demons. The Humans is pretty on-brand for distributor A24 in that it dabbles in the syntax of genre, but how scary you find it will probably depend on how much you relate to Erik, a dinosaur who can see the asteroid coming for him now that nobody really depends on him anymore.

TIFF ’21: Scarborough

September 15, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Liam Diaz, Essence Fox, Anna Claire Beitel, Felix Jedi Ingram Isaac
screenplay by Catherine Hernandez, based on her novel
directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson

by Angelo Muredda “You’re a good boy,” a mother whispers to her bullied preteen son Bing (Liam Diaz) while he sleeps early on in Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson’s Scarborough, a reverent and rambling adaptation of Catherine Hernandez’s buzzy Canadian novel of the same name. While Bing may well need the affirmation in the grips of his abuse at the hands of classmates, it largely underlines one of the festival darling’s more nagging qualities: a tendency to annotate all its emotional beats. An ostentatiously literary cousin to cloying ensemble family dramas like “This Is Us”, given texture mostly by its notes of regional specificity and trio of unaffected child performances, Scarborough goes out of its way to chart the relative goodness of its characters whenever possible, as though its filmmakers think we might not arrive at the right conclusions without moralizing notes.

Telluride ’21: The Power of the Dog

September 14, 2021****/****, 2021, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, New Zealand, Romance, Streaming, Telluride, UK, Western

****/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee
written by Jane Campion, based on the novel by Thomas Savage
directed by Jane Campion

by Walter Chaw There is about Jane Campion’s work the air of the poet, and indeed there may be no better interpreter, translator, or adaptor of poetry than another poet. Her body of work is, to a one, in the thrall of the rapture of language: what words are capable of when arranged properly, powerfully. Campion demonstrates mastery of both what is spoken and what is seen, how words delivered with exquisite, just-so composition and deadly-true execution become, at the moment of their sublimation, images in the mind like witchcraft with no physical intervention in between. Music in the eye. Of all the easy and obvious examples in her work–the imagistic, rapturous biography of John Keats (Bright Star), the voice of the voiceless in The Piano, the shockingly immediate illumination of Kiwi author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table–the one that springs to mind most easily and often when I’m describing Campion’s work is the reaction of New York City English teacher Frankie, played by Meg Ryan, as she contemplates the words of Lorca printed on a literacy campaign poster in a subway car in Campion’s In the Cut. She looks upon them as a sinner looks upon the gallery of saints illuminated in the coloured windows of old cathedrals. Words are a rapture, a vehicle, and Campion, with her training as a painter, proves through the medium of film to be the premier painter of words. Loathe to make such pronouncements, I nonetheless spend most days thinking of Campion as my favourite living director and other days thinking of her as my favourite of all time. She is an artist.

TIFF ’21: Violet

September 12, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
starring Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, Erica Ash, Dennis Boutsikaris
written and directed by Justine Bateman

by Bill Chambers In her taped introduction to Violet, actress-turned-filmmaker Justine Bateman describes it as an immersive experience, tantamount to putting on a coat. I would say it’s slightly more akin to having a pillow on your face. Though not explicitly autobiographical, the picture indeed betrays an insider’s grasp of Hollywood politics in its portrait of a production executive plagued by self-doubt and industry sexism, including, fairly, the internalized misogyny of a female underling. Violet (Olivia Munn) has reached a ceiling in her current job that probably can’t be broken. Her passion project is in limbo, the perfect man (Luke Bracey) is Just a Friend, and she’s still shook from a relationship that ended badly when she accidentally burned down their apartment. A scene where her boss (the great Dennis Boutsikaris) gets her pumped up about the book of poetry she dreams of turning into a film only so he can sucker punch her in a meeting with talent, Scorpion-and-the-Frog-style, captures something essential of toxic power dynamics in the entertainment industry that a more straightforward lampoon of a Rudin/Weinstein type probably would not. Another truthful moment, opposite in effect, finds Violet making a move on Bracey’s Red that surprises even her. It’s genuinely swoony. Then she spends the drive back to his place worrying she’ll be judged for dating beneath her station. (Red’s a screenwriter.) The irony of Violet being an eminently relatable mess of insecurities in an Olivia Munn-shaped package fades over the course of the film, perhaps in a way it wouldn’t have before “the great equalizer” of our current pandemic.

Telluride ’21: C’mon C’mon

September 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scoot McNairy, Gaby Hoffmann, Jaboukie Young-White
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw It takes a certain level of courage to make a movie like Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, in which at least one, possibly two of the three main characters are so profoundly irritating it would be cathartic to see them shocked into compliant conformity. But that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. It’s a film about mining difficult conversations, asking the right questions and listening to the answers, practicing empathy when it’s absolutely the riskiest thing to do, i.e., when the person you’re trying to empathize with is smart, slippery, and able to push all of your buttons. Relationships, in other words–intimate ones with family where between platitudes and comfortable silences, there can erupt withering indictments and unresolved grievances. I love Mills’s Beginners and 20th Century Women because of their essential kindness, how Mills writes dialogue that’s searching without being grating, honest without being cruel. His characters are looking for the right way to do things, the elegant thing to say at the moment of crisis, but they’re thwarted by unexpected developments and circumstances beyond their control. His films are about navigating choppy waters with only the love of your family to guide you, and they’re beautiful.

Telluride ’21: Cyrano

September 9, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Musical, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Erica Schmidt, based on the play by Edmond Rostand
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Joe Wright’s derided Pan where Nirvana‘s anthemic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is stirringly transposed into an indentured/enslaved orphans’ lament. I thought to myself that Wright had a musical in him if he wanted, and here it is, this umpteenth adaptation of Cyrano (de Bergerac), which I fought against for a little while and then went along with. I had a similar experience with Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, where an old idea presented in an earnest and earnestly gonzo way lives or dies by our investment in the chemistry of its central pair and the melancholy embedded in the thought that every love story is a tragedy eventually. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National wrote the songs and score for this musical reimagining of Rostand’s fable. They are the band I have seen the most times in concert. They were my kids’ first experience at Red Rocks–we planned it that way, planting the seed maybe for somewhere down the line when they will look back and understand why the band’s stories of loss, regret, and the briefness of all things spoke to me so loudly.

Telluride ’21: Spencer

September 8, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman’s excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage–a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It’s one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England‘s afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain’s impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana’s tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain’s previous examination of a woman encased–and left adrift–in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman’s takedown of Thatcher’s England, and all three left me a mess.

Telluride ’21: King Richard

September 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jon Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott
written by Zach Baylin
directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

by Walter Chaw You know what this movie is. You know the major beats, you know the resolution, and in those rare instances when something happens you maybe don’t expect, you know immediately how it will resolve. There is no surprise to movies like Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard by design, not misstep–they are by their nature for the least discriminating audience, the ones desperate to avoid challenge, thinking, reconsideration, discomfort. It is Taco Bell on vacation. You go there for a reason and none of it has to do with the quality of the food. It’s the disgusting robe you’ve had since college that your wife begs you to throw away, but you don’t. King Richard is garbage that people like, machine-extruded pap, hardwired and cynically engineered to garner a certain level of prestige. It’s the uplift picture multiplied by a minority voice. It’s ugly manipulation, more horse-betting than art–though the gamblers would argue that what they do is science rather than just venal calculation.

Telluride ’21: The French Dispatch

September 5, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
**/****
starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw Out of three sections, not including a framing story, there is one that gets what it’s after with the soul of wit and a tug of the heart along the way. It’s the middle section, the one concerning a brilliant modern artist incarcerated in a French prison for dismembering two bartenders who falls in love with one of his jailers. He is Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his eternal Beatrice, his jack-booted muse, is Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the pas de deux they perform together encapsulates a range of lovely nuance that crystallizes what it is that Wes Anderson does very well, if only occasionally these days, in brief flashes glimpsed between the metric ton of artifice and affectation. For many, the chantilly is the point of Anderson–those gaudy elements that make him one of the most satirized filmmakers of his generation. For me, and up through The Darjeeling Limited, what I liked best about Wes Anderson was his sometimes shockingly effective grappling with absent fathers and broken families. His twee quirk used to be a delivery system for emotional squalls. Now, if those crescendos are there, they’re gasping for air.

The Green Knight (2021) + Pig (2021)

August 30, 2021****/****, 2021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, Ireland, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, VOD

THE GREEN KNIGHT
****/****
starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Ralph Nelson
written for the screen and directed by David Lowery

PIG
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
written and directed by Michael Sarnoski

by Walter Chaw A thing has no value if there is no risk of losing it. A treasure is only that if there are hobbits. If you’re a parent and you’ve done everything right, and everything goes exactly as it should, your children will know the exquisite pain of your death. The story for us all ideally has the tang of misadventure to it and a sad ending full of irony. It is a great fable without a moral, wrought with temptations–though hopefully, when the curtain falls, free of too much regret. The key to navigating the labyrinth of the Rose Poet’s medieval romance “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is perhaps in its prologue, where it presents the history of the founding of England from the Fall of Troy through to Aeneas’s further stories: his conquests and foundings, sure, but also the inevitable decline of his line. A popular version of this history around the time that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” would have been written holds that Brutus of Troy is the grandson of Aeneas, exiled from Italy because, in fulfillment of a prophecy similar to the one that doomed Oedipus, he accidentally killed his father with an errant arrow. In the course of his wanderings, this Brute, the product of a cursed line beset with hubris and tragic folly, becomes the first king of what would be called England.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Dreams on Fire

August 23, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan

***/****
starring Bambi Naka, Akaji Maro, Ikuyo Kuroda, Masahiro Takashima
written and directed by Philippe McKie

by Walter Chaw I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a film quite like Philippe McKie’s Dreams on Fire. Not for its story of a young dancer looking for her big break while jumping from humiliating job to humiliating job; Flashdance and Fame are two of the picture’s obvious touchpoints, although the Step Up franchise is the obvious headwater. Rather, Dreams on Fire is distinctive because of its focus on how each failure is a gift if you can manage somehow not to quit. The movie opens in a familiar place as young Yume (Bambi Naka) declares her dream of being a dancer to the violent disapproval of her tradition-bound grandfather (Akaji Maro), her mother (Ikuyo Kuroda) hiding to avoid the conversation. I’ve learned something, hopefully not too late, after thirty-some years in corporate America: that everything my parents taught me was a measure of success was a lie. Education, climbing the ladder, home-ownership, money as the end-all/be-all of happiness–lies, obvious lies. I have achieved everything I was supposed to achieve and it didn’t make me happier for even a moment. No one comes to the end of their life wishing they’d worked more. I made the decision to be happy, and my worst days now are better than my best days then.

Fantasia Festival ’21: When I Consume You

August 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery

**½/****
starring MacLeod Andrews, Evan Dumouchel, Libby Ewing
written and directed by Perry Blackshear

by Walter Chaw Living with addiction, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Wilson (Evan Dumouchel) are siblings on the perpetual edge of destitution. They are each other’s only means of emotional and occasionally material support. As writer-director Perry Blackshear’s When I Consume You opens, Daphne spits blood and other viscera into a sink and yells through the bathroom door that she just needs a minute. She has a secret to hide, and her brother seems to be having a rough time of it, so maybe that’s why she’s not telling him whatever it is that’s going on with her. A lovely early scene that won me over, as it happens, sees Wilson having a panic attack and Daphne talking him through it. This depiction of the sibling relationship is intimate, empathetic, and authentic-feeling. There’ve been a few compelling sibling relationships anchoring horror films–I’m thinking of the brothers in The Lost Boys, or the brother/sister in Jeepers Creepers, and how those films similarly use threats to that relationship as empathy engine and maybe even as a metaphor for growing apart. A flashback in When I Consume You to, if not “happier,” at least earlier times, shows the pair working on a project together in a tight physical space talking about shared burdens and possible futures that we know are insurmountable on the one hand and doomed on the other. Affecting stuff, and it proves to be the central concern of When I Consume You after all the sound and fury burns off: It’s your siblings who know what you’ve been through; and maybe it’s your siblings who, for as much as they’re responsible for you holding on to your demons, will help you get past them, too.

Almost Famous (2000) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

August 18, 20212000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

Almost Famous **½/****
Untitled ***/****
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Bryant Frazer Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s fondly remembered period piece about a bygone era of rock stars and the various satellites in their orbit, is a bit of a relic these days. Even on its release in 2000, when it was almost 30 years removed from its subject matter, Almost Famous was a notably uncritical celebration of a moment in 20^th-century music history. Another 20 years on, having centred the phallic sexual and creative powers of a white guy with a guitar, Almost Famous is increasingly disconnected from the prevailing pop and hip-hop zeitgeist, and the film feels even more like cultural hagiography. On the other hand, it is a hell of a story. The fundamentals are autobiographical: Cameron Crowe really was a 15-year-old whiz kid who earned early graduation from high school; he really did seek career advice from legendary rock-and-roll critic Lester Bangs; and he really landed a ROLLING STONE assignment to hit the road with a group of next-big-thing cock-rockers. The story, as Crowe retells it here, has intrepid young journo William Miller (a fresh-faced Patrick Fugit) on assignment with the fictional rock group Stillwater–dealing with celebrity egos, yearning for the teenaged groupies who sprinkle their figurative fairy dust around a series of interchangeable ballrooms, basketball arenas, and hotel suites, and checking in with a protective mother (Frances McDormand) who can only peer helplessly into her son’s wonderland from her world outside the circus tent. Finally, William meets with his editors back at HQ to bang out a chunk of blistering reportage that will lay bare the raw emotional state of a band on tour and cement his status as a rock journalist. What could go wrong?

CODA (2021)

August 16, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Disability, Drama, Music, Streaming

½*/****
starring Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin
screenplay by Sian Heder, based on the original motion picture La Famille Belier by Éric Lartigau
directed by Sian Heder

by Walter Chaw It says something, something terrible, that the Deaf community has expressed gratefulness for CODA because it’s some kind of representation, while also expressing trepidation because CODA trafficks in harmful stereotypes and centres the hearing perspective. The great Marlee Matlin made news by insisting that deaf actors be cast as the film’s deaf family, and that’s amazing, huge, a tremendous step in the right direction–and still, the material is so rancid that all of their great work highlights how desperately this community deserves to have material worthy of them. CODA is a grotesque bit of “big performance”/workingman’s blues uplift trash in the vein of Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dangerous Minds. It has a high-school audition montage, for Christ’s sake. (A practicing-for-the-big-recital montage, too.) CODA posits that Deaf people don’t like music even though it shows the parents, Jackie (Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), pulling up to a heavy rap beat, suggesting that the film itself doesn’t consider rap to be music, just a noise even Deaf people can appreciate.