Esoterica Archives - Page 5 of 17

A Ghost Story (2017) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

October 29, 20172017, Authors: Alex Jackson, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Romance

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara
written and directed by David Lowery

by Alex Jackson All forms of an afterlife are kitsch. You can’t even conceptualize Heaven, Hell, reincarnation, or spiritualism without turning it into a greeting card or a joke. Kitsch is built into the concept. There was a point in my life where I felt that while it was kitsch, kitsch was all we had. The only other option was to confront the vast nothingness and indifference of the universe and acknowledge how little time and space we take up in the grand scheme. Maybe our belief in a life after death is the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not falling because he doesn’t look down.

The Florida Project (2017)

October 17, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Sean Baker’s The Florida Project follows the day-to-day of a group of five- or six-year-olds as they run wild through the broken-down streets, hot-sheet motels, and abandoned buildings that serve as the ramshackle spokes radiating out from Disney World in Orlando. Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is the ringleader, impossibly exuberant and sly in exactly and only the way a six-year-old in full operational mode can be. She is a force of nature, and Prince’s performance is entirely unaffected. It’s a miracle. Moonee’s best friends are Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), and they roam far afield, standing on picnic tables, exploring empty housing units, experimenting with lighters, and scamming ice-cream cones from marks more exhausted by their pitch (“I have asthma and my doctor said that I…”) than convinced by it. I was free like this when I was 5. I grew up in downtown Golden, Colorado, which has as its main identifying feature a wooden sign stretching across its “main” street (“Washington”) that says “Howdy Folks!” I used to catch flies and shine shoes in the barbershop on the corner. The barber was the mayor, Frank. I spent the pennies I earned at the 5 and 10 across the street. The Florida Project is about that.

Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2017****/****, 1960s, 1970s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Japan

EROS + MASSACRE (1969)
****/****
Director’s Cut: Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
Theatrical Version: Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Mariko Okada, Toshiyuji Hosokawa, Yûko Kusunoki, Etsushi Takahashi
written by Masahiro Yamada & Yoshishige Yoshida
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

HEROIC PURGATORY (1970)
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Mariko Okada, Kaizo Kamoda, Naho Kimura, Yoshiaki Makita
written by Masahiro Yamada
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

COUP D’ETAT (1973)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Rentarô Mikuni, Yasuo Miyake, Akiko Kurano, Tadahiko Sugano
written by Minoru Betsuyaku
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

by Bryant Frazer In director Yoshishige Yoshida’s restlessly erotic trio of films dealing with Japanese radicalism (aptly dubbed “Love + Anarchism” by Arrow Films), past and present merge as easily and ineluctably as the personal and the political. Released between 1969 and 1973, they were made at a politically turbulent time in Japan, when the New Left movement gained social currency and student anarchists, the Zengakuren, challenged the status quo by occupying buildings at universities and high schools around the country. In that conflict between anarchy and order, Yoshida saw reflections of Japan’s past–earlier generations of radicals who challenged societal structures in the same way that new activists were pushing back against contemporary norms. Yoshida was not inspired to make anything as simple as a series of biopics or historical dramas; instead, he embarked on a series of formally elaborate films that evaluated the struggles of radicals and would-be revolutionaries from decades past in light of the then-current political moment.

Telluride ’17: Loving Vincent

September 21, 20172017, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Mystery, Poland, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

*/****
written by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Jacek Dehnel
directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

by Walter Chaw I love stop-motion animation. William Blake referred to the “infernal method,” talking about etching plates with acid and how each print of his work would be touched by him, the artist, to better imbue it with life. Stop-motion animation to me is evidence that there’s something to the idea of a transference of vitality through human contact. It’s why I was curious about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s insane Loving Vincent, a feature-length film composed of over 65,000 hand-painted oil paintings, animating Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and making characters of his subjects. It’s a fascinating experiment, the product of one of those late-night bull sessions fuelled by cigarettes and whiskey where aspiring artist-types and freshman cosmology students get profound with one another. Consider Loving Vincent to be the cold reality of the morning after. Over 100 artists laboured over 10 years to essentially make a tedious rotoscope cartoon held together, barely, by an embarrassing screenplay dependent on loads of exposition and a repetitive flashback device. It’s an endurance test of rare sadism.

Telluride ’17: First Reformed

September 19, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017

****/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Walter Chaw The title character of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest is consumed by his inconsequence. Determined to make a difference, he can’t even make an impression on the vile inhabitants of the little town that is his parish. It consumes him. It kills him. No one notices. There’s nothing to notice. Bresson doesn’t even bother to show it. The priest’s voiceovers become more urgent, though his faith never flags. He develops terrible stomach pains he seeks to soothe with an austere diet of bread soaked in wine: the Host, I guess, that nourishes communion with the holy spirit, but also the cancer in his gut that consumes him. His last words? “All is grace.” Paul Schrader, raised in the Dutch Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, which basically believes that Christians don’t earn their salvation but rather receive it as a gift they don’t deserve, has made it his life’s work to react against his faith–and to live it, too, when reaction fails. Towards the end of his new film, First Reformed, the priest, Toller (Ethan Hawke), writes on his church’s whiteboard “Will God Forgive Us?,” which is less Calvinist–God already has forgiven us–than a sign of a faith in severe crisis. Schrader’s riffed on Bresson’s film before with his script for Taxi Driver, still his best-known work despite a career littered with masterpieces of individual fears, men in isolation from God, and spiritual self-loathing. In Taxi Driver, the Priest is a sociopath driving through a Times Square hellscape, praying for the apocalypse to come as a purifying, obliterating rain. He tries to kill himself, but becomes a hero instead. First Reformed is either less cynical or more cynical than that. It’s complicated.

TIFF ’17: Man Hunt + Happy End

September 18, 20172017, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, TIFF

ManHunt
**/****
starring Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ha Jiwon
screenplay by Nip Wan Fung, Gordon Chan, James Yuen, Itaru Era, Ku Zoi Lam, Maria Wong, Sophia Yeh, based on the novel Kimiyo funnu no kawa wo watare by Juko Nishimura
directed by John Woo

HAPPY END
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bill Chambers About five seconds into John Woo’s Man Hunt (no relation to that Fritz Lang movie with George Sanders in a cave), there’s a freeze-frame. Followed shortly by another. It’s glorious. Digital filmmaking has no doubt made it easier for Woo to be himself, as has being back in Asia: Hollywood never did warm to his Peckinpah flourishes, nor his melodramatic flair. But something is off in Man Hunt, which finds Woo returning, a touch desperately, to the Heroic Bloodshed genre in the form of a gloss on The Fugitive. (Officially, it’s a remake of a Ken Takakura vehicle variously known as Manhunt and Hot Pursuit.) Chinese Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is a hotshot lawyer for a pharmaceutical company that frames him for the murder of an alleged lover (Tao Okamoto, bestowing her iconic look on a role that doesn’t thank her in return) to protect its secrets; Japanese Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hotshot Inspector sent after Du when he escapes custody. Du repeatedly eludes Yamura’s clutches, but over the course of the chase they build a rapport that transcends lawful and cultural barriers and, à la Hard-Boiled, unite against a common enemy, corrupt CEO Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura). I should mention the two female super-assassins hot on Du’s trail, since Woo’s daughter Angeles plays one of them. For better or worse, this is personal filmmaking.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

June 19, 20172017, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Crime, Esoterica, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane
written by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Bryant Frazer John Wick: Chapter 2 opens, somewhat incongruously, with shots from a Buster Keaton action sequence projected on the side of a midtown Manhattan office building. Make no mistake: That’s not homage–it’s a declaration of principles. Hell, it’s a boast. A master of stunts, sight gags, and visual effects, Keaton was perhaps the most sophisticated silent filmmaker when it came to truly understanding and exploiting cinematic space–the magical Méliès, maybe, to Chaplin’s more grounded Lumière. For much of film history, his influence was felt most vividly in movie musicals, where the athleticism of Gene Kelly, especially, seemed to call back to Keaton’s knockabout screen presence. In the 1970s, the best musical action on screen was happening in Hong Kong, as Bruce Lee’s lethal martial arts style laid the groundwork for Jackie Chan’s more broadly comic (though no less precisely conceived and executed) fighting style. Chan was no fan of guns, but John Woo developed a balletic, two-fisted style of gunplay while imagining rom-com mainstay Chow Yun-Fat as an action hero in the Clint Eastwood mold. That brings us more or less to John Wick, as director Chad Stahelski and the army of drivers, stunt coordinators, military veterans, tactical firearms consultants, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructors who helped turn Keanu Reeves into a precision-tuned killing machine assert their legitimacy as heirs to a tradition that began in the days of hand-cranked cameras and nitrate stock.

A Cure for Wellness (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 12, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness is lurid unto beautiful, exquisite pulp, just barmy enough to attract a cult and just smart enough to deserve it. The central conceit is that humans are only really good as biological filters for pollutants; in place of the batteries of The Matrix, the film sees people as distilleries for some sort of immortality potion. The process kills them. I learned when I was young that rabies is a kind of fear of water: its sufferers die of thirst even surrounded by water. The old, rich, white/white-collar victims of A Cure for Wellness entomb themselves in an alpine sanatorium invested in hydrotherapy in hopes of feeling, you know, better. Their sickness is of the soul, alas. The irony of the water cure offered by their ostensible saviours is that the patients become desiccated, mortally. There seems to be a message in there about how the illness of soulless acquisition is self-inflicted, and the amount expended in solution only exacerbates it. Money is bad. The making of it is incestuous, perverse, and insatiable. It’s a strange thing to say in a movie that cost a lot of money, but the point is well taken. Especially now.

Collateral Beauty (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

April 9, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras F
starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren
written by Allan Loeb
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Collateral Beauty is the conversation you had that one time with the stupidest person you’ve ever met, in that it’s so stupid it poses an existential problem for you. It happened to me once when, as a bartender, one of the waitresses asked me with concern how she could transform the Coke float she’d ordered into the Sprite float the customer had ordered. I didn’t know. I still don’t. And not having the answer to a question posed by the stupidest person you’ve ever met is horrifying. It’s like you come home one day and your guinea pig greets you with a zen kōan. It’s Kafka’s great unwritten tale. It’s Collateral Beauty: a question with no answer posed by the stupidest movie ever made. Really, the only solution is to dump it out and start from scratch. Collateral Beauty is about grief, sort of, and gaslighting, and it’s shot like a visit to Whole Foods in the sense that it’s burnished with a classy patina and full of pretty people you’d like to be. Then you get to the checkout lane and it’s too much, but you’re too embarrassed to put anything back. Also, the food tastes like ass.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) + This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) – DVDs

March 26, 20171960s, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Brazil, DVD, Esoterica, Horror

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo Lima, Valeria Vasquez
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Roque Rodrigues, Nadia Freitas, William Morgan
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

by Alice Stoehr Zé do Caixão, known to English-speaking audiences as Coffin Joe, is like Mr. Hyde without a Dr. Jekyll. Although nominally a small-town undertaker, he has the mien and rap sheet of a supervillain. Attired in top hat and cape, he stalks the countryside, bent on perpetuating his bloodline. He luxuriates in his own depravity. He’s a horror-movie monster, and he loves it. Joe is the brainchild of Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins, who’s been playing the role for decades. He introduced the character back in the 1960s with a pair of colourfully-titled films: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and, three years later, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. Both of those phrases are threats spoken onscreen by Joe’s victims; both hint at ghostly mischief and a lurid tone. Unhindered by understatement, these films dispense atrocities at the rate of about one per reel. Joe’s first evil act, mere minutes into Soul, is blasphemy: he spends Good Friday noshing on a leg of lamb–an unthinkable sin to his pious Catholic neighbours–then, like a schoolyard bully, forces an unwilling bystander to take a bite. Further iniquities pile up quickly in the form of bullwhipping, blinding, and immolation. When an elder dares to challenge him, Joe lacerates the man’s face with a Christ figurine’s crown of thorns.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 28, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

El Ángel Exterminador
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico
screenplay by Luis Buñuel, based on the story “Los Náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia” by Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buñuel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Bryant Frazer The first scene of The Exterminating Angel takes place at the gate outside a stately mansion where the house’s butler, Julio (Claudio Brook), confronts Lucas (Ángel Merino), a servant trying to sneak off the grounds just as the staff is preparing a dinner party for twenty. The worker hesitates for a moment, then continues on his way, the butler calling angrily after him: “Never set foot in this house again.” It’s the beginning of a very long night for the steward, who is vexed as his waiters and kitchen staff, one by one or in pairs, desert their posts for the evening at the worst possible time. The servants know something’s wrong, and though they’re not sure what it is, none of them–save the unflappable Julio, who keeps the gears turning smoothly–are willing to stick around to find out. When Lucia (Lucy Gallardo), the frustrated lady of the house, barks her offense at this betrayal, Julio is there to reassure her. “Domestic help grows more impertinent by the day, madam,” he declares.

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

February 19, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

Paterson (2016)

December 28, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley, Masatoshi Nagase
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw My Pocket Poets edition of William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations has the worn, faded, ineffably-dusty feeling of a paperback printed on low stock from a certain period. The back cover tells me there was once a day it could be had for $1.25. I’ve read it probably a hundred times, though I can’t say I ever read it sequentially. This was the first year, as it happens, that I read The Art of War sequentially. I regard both texts as reference books: for the winning, for the existing. The kind you open to a page and read carefully, and then you put the book down next to you and look at the world differently for a moment. I have favourite passages from each. This is one of them from the Williams:

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

December 7, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
screenplay by Tom Ford, based on the novel Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright
directed by Tom Ford

by Walter Chaw It opens with an already-notorious slow-motion consideration of a gallery of morbidly-obese women in tiny cowboy hats, naked and holding sparklers while gyrating to Abel Korzeniowski's moody, derivative score. Not long after, someone will comment how, as an art installation, it's a withering indictment of junk culture, in response to which our ostensible heroine Susan (Amy Adams) intones, "Junk. It's all junk." As self-awareness goes, this is as hollow as the rest of Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, a dirge of shallow introspection and sanctified ugliness that is, as it happens, a pretty trenchant critique of the landscape that would normalize a Trump presidency. Consider that the installation isn't "junk" so much as the kind of conversation people of a certain intuition might have about the limitations of media to sell something biology rejects. It's a tentative salvo into the nature/nurture debate and the extent to which popular culture can influence the innate. The answer? It can, a little. More often, it merely gratifies/reflects the base. Calling it "junk" reveals a specific attitude that the only thing obese women are capable of representing is over-consumption and, in the sparklers and hats, a sad sort of patriotism. Tom Ford has a message. I get it. It's gotten away from you. The signifier is greater than the sign.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|[The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 21, 2016****/****, 2000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Film Festivals, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Pdl1

****/****
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis’s audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg’s sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here’s a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Cronenberg’s Spider, and Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

Swiss Army Man (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 24, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Zombie

Swissarmyman1

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.

The Immortal Story (1968) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 19, 20161960s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Orson Welles, Drama, Esoterica, France, Television, The Criterion Collection

Immortalstory4

Histoire immortelle
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Orson Welles
written by Orson Welles, from a short story by Karen Blixen
directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer It’s one of those salutary coincidences of movie history that the final narrative film completed by Orson Welles would turn out to be this rumination on an old man’s obsession with storytelling. It’s not that Welles was exactly elderly at the time (he was 51 when he made it), but there’s a matter-of-fact finality to the work that becomes just a touch spooky in retrospect. Commissioned by the French national television agency as a Jeanne Moreau vehicle to commemorate the transition to colour television, The Immortal Story required that Welles work in colour for the first time, catalyzing a fairly dramatic evolution of his style. But it gave him the opportunity to adapt a short story by Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), one of his favourite writers, and to work again with Moreau, one of his favourite actors. Less than an hour long, it has remained an obscure film for a variety of reasons, but it’s intermittently remarkable despite its modesty.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Short Films

October 15, 20162016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.

TIFF ’16: The Bad Batch; Colossal; Jackie

October 13, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Chile, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, TIFF

THE BAD BATCH
**½/****
starring Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

COLOSSAL
**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

JACKIE
***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Bill Chambers Three very different #TIFF16 films–a postapocalyptic cannibal western (The Bad Batch), a modestly-scaled kaiju eiga (Colossal), and a period docudrama (Jackie)–form a trilogy in my mind thematically linked by crestfallen female protagonists who discover reserves of strength in dire situations. The Bad Batch is the only one of these movies directed by a woman, though, and dare I say you can tell, not only in how the camera softly caresses Jason Momoa’s Olympian contours, but also in the way the framing and blocking of the heroine imply the constant peril of being a woman. Working through the neophyte filmmaker’s genre playbook, director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with this dystopian flick most reminiscent of the Australian strain in terms of vibe/aesthetics, what with its shantytown sets, symbolic names, and obligatory feral child. (The only thing missing is a car fetish.) Winsome Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to the other side of some Trumpian fence in Texas with only the clothes on her back and a tattoo that identifies her as an undesirable (or bad batch). Almost immediately she’s dragged away to a cannibal camp, where they chop off her right arm. Missing a leg, too, by the time she escapes, she finds refuge–and prosthetic limbs–in the village of Comfort, whose denizens mostly give her space. Time and body-image issues stoke her desire for revenge, however, putting her on a collision course with Momoa’s Miami Man, a brilliant sketch artist who’s also a fearsome, unsympathetic consumer of human flesh.

The Neon Demon (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

October 5, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Nicolas Winding Refn and Mary Laws & Polly Stenham
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw There’s a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon: “There was a demon that lived in the air.” I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture’s title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn’s film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with “whoever challenged [the demon] would die…where the air could no longer get out of the way.” The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth–the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning–that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there’s The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It’s astonishing.