Family Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Ryan Gosling floating in a tin can: "Astronaut Ken"

Hoppers (2026) + Project Hail Mary (2026)

March 31, 20262026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

HOPPERS
**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews
directed by Daniel Chong

PROJECT HAIL MARY
**½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Milana Vayntrub, Ken Leung
screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir
directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

by Walter Chaw I have great affection for Pixar, even Pixar of late. I think for the most part they do their best with representation, and although their films often feel viciously engineered for maximum emotional devastation now, they’re at least skillful at honouring their role as catalysts for tangible cathexis and catharsis. They’re not all for me–you can keep, for instance, the profit-motive-driven Cars trilogy, the bowdlerized Elio, and the reckless-seeming Inside Out movies, but I still recognize the impact those films have on their audiences as similar to the lasting pull of stuff like WALL·E and Elemental on me. One criterion of good art is if it continues to evolve, nay, metastasize as one revisits it over the years. I will say that Pixar’s worst, most rote films seem aimed at younger audiences, with lessons that are essentially uncomplicated screeds about friendship and acceptance. To that end, I do wonder if their best days, when they consistently delved into real philosophical and/or existential complexities, are behind them. Maybe it’s only time that turned Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Toy Story 3, all from the Aughts, into masterpieces in my mind. Maybe, but I don’t think so.

Elio lying on a beach with a colander for a hat: "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”

Elio (2025)

June 21, 20252025, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Julia Cho & Mark Hammer & Mike Jones
directed by Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw Elio, from Coco co-director Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian (animator, Turning Red), and Domee Shi (director, Turning Red), is a derivative oddball-kid/buddy comedy space adventure of the middle-aspiring family-programmer variety Pixar now uses to pad its roster between increasingly flaccid and uninspired franchise tentpoles. How the mighty have fallen. Boasting three directors and three writers (Julia Cho (Turning Red), Mark Hammer (Shotgun Wedding), and Mike Jones (Soul and Luca)), it’s a mosaic of borrowed bits designed to geek chafed pleasure centres, thus ensuring the relative placidity of your children for a couple of hours. That is, if the shot-for-shot “live-action” remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon have run their course…which they haven’t. Maybe the inevitably tepid word-of-mouth damning praise–the “you know, for kids!” and “the whole family will like it” kind, or even the classic “it’s not great, but I cried”–will help it reach whatever goals it’s meant to before assuming its proper place as anonymous streaming filler for a content-voracious delivery service. It’s the sort of movie Common Sense Media and other censorious sites for terrible parents adore, if that gives you an idea. It’s funny because it’s not like I even dislike Elio; it’s just that if you ask me to think about it, I start to realize how much of my life I’ve wasted.

Jackie Chan looking off into the distance as Ralph Macchio and Ben Wang lock fists: "When you realize you forgot to pick up Jaden Smith from summer camp 15 years ago"

Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

May 27, 20252025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Ralph Macchio
written by Rob Lieber
directed by Jonathan Entwistle

by Walter Chaw I have a complicated relationship with John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid. I saw it in the theatre multiple times when I was 11 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times more on VHS. I did not know that Noriyuki “Pat” Morita spoke without an accent in reality, didn’t trouble myself with the damage this type of sensei character did to my minority in this country, didn’t sense that this was any kind of cultural appropriation, because as an Asian-American kid born and raised in a predominantly white backwater of Colorado, this was and remains ground zero of my culture. Appropriation? Of what? Not Okinawan culture, surely–what’s left of it after our now-eighty-year occupation of it. No, this is American culture, for good and for bad; don’t blame someone else for it. The Karate Kid was my Rocky. (Same director and composer, even.) Mr. Miyagi, together with Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, both from the same year as The Karate Kid (1984), formed this foundational trilogy of Asian tokenism in the heart of the Reagan administration/Blockbuster Generation, during which I was reared. Perhaps not inconsequently, it’s this same period that sowed the seeds for our current neo-conservative Ragnarök. It was like they emerged at the same time on purpose, the Three Wise Men attending Evangelical Christ’s Young Life presumption to the reins of American Empire: the father (Miyagi), the son (Shorty), and the holy ghost (Long Duk Dong) constituting a thesis statement for the only way Asian-American men in their native film industry could be portrayed with the enthusiastic consent of anyone with an opinion. Can I get an “A(sian)men?”

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

April 9, 20252025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers
screenplay by Chris Bowman & Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener & Gavin James and Chris Galletta
directed by Jared Hess

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to get knives out to hack at the hanks of the great beast. It’s tempting to sharpen your tongue to shriek at it, how close we are now to Idiocracy‘s prophecy of Ass: The Movie being the most watched and awarded film in the land. I keep coming back to the image of Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, peering through the fourth wall to tell you it’s too late. They’re here already. The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can’t feel shame. As it was never alive, you can’t kill it, and if you can’t kill it, neither can you bury it. You can fight, but you’ll lose. Not to the great beast, but to your friends and neighbours, who will urge you to forget it, take it easy. They will rationalize that some garbage piece of media was made for children, as if the things we make for children should be terrible. Feed them the rotten stuff, the maggot-infested stuff–they won’t know. Give them the chair with the splinters; the toy that takes eyes; the water full of lead. Why worry? It’s just for kids. It’s just for kids you don’t think will grow up or don’t care if they do. It’s cheaper not to let them live. When they consume, that’s less for you to consume. Maybe we should change our laws so they can work longer when they’re younger, because they don’t seem to last as long as they used to. Lie back and enjoy it. Pray you never get that direction outside of invitations to kid’s movies. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they’re not. Your loved ones are dead. I’m sorry.

Snow White (2025)

March 25, 20252025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Rachel Zegler, Andrew Burnap, Gal Gadot
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw In the case of live-action Disney reboots, it isn’t a matter of whether they’re a hate crime, but how egregious a hate crime they are. We expect dead-eyed CGI renderings of what were once astonishingly evocative hand-drawn miracles. We expect the shameless tokenism that sees race as a costume white people take on and off at their diversity balls and the feckless, tossed-off malaise that mercenary money-grabs can never entirely shake. Despite all that, despite the built-in stench of failure that attends these spectacles like miasmas of bluebottle flies on gas-bloated corpses, the Mouse keeps pumping them out, beholden to an accounting ledger they bind like a script. The goal isn’t art or expression, nothing so lofty. The goal is a percentage–a shareholder-appeasing PowerPoint presentation delivered by a board of directors, not a single one of whom would otherwise be trusted to form a graceful turn of phrase or produce something that could flower into a product that is culturally significant in a nurturing way. They are stripminers, colonizers of your childhood, overburdening resources for personal gain. Their legacy will be how they took our memories and replaced them with further evidence that there is nothing good the dullest, emptiest people in the world won’t exploit for profit.

Paddington Bear writing in a journal: Dear Diary, Timothy Treadwell was delicious.

Paddington in Peru (2024)

February 22, 20252024, 2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, France, Japan, Mystery, UK

*/****
starring Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Ben Whishaw
screenplay by Mark Burton, Jon Foster & James Lamont
directed by Dougal Wilson

by Walter Chaw Remember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” where the gang goes to Hawaii and finds a cursed Tiki idol? That was hilarious. What I mean is it was memorably not hilarious, a brazen and desperate last gasp at relevance and invention that is held up alongside the “Happy Days” where Fonzie waterskis over a shark as shorthand for what happens when a beloved institution runs out of ideas: the death wave of a drowning man. Anyway, the third instalment of the Paddington franchise uproots the Browns of Windsor Gardens and drops them in the middle of a rainforest in search of a horrifying convent filthy with energetic British nuns given to random outbursts of song that are less delightful than pointedly aggressive. Imagine Olivia Colman, dialled to 11, decked out in full habit, keening a single, held high note for a full 20 seconds, and you have a small taste of the unpleasantness of this probably unintentional nunsploitation horror. Call it “Bleak Narcissus.” Gone is the charm of the previous Paddingtons, and with it the focus on absolute patience and kindness that made this series such a balm to the brutal and inconsiderate hell of our day-to-day. In its place? A jungle quest punctuated by elaborate pratfalls as cuddly Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) tries to recover his dementia-addled Great Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) from an unplanned walkabout in the wilderness of Peru. The step down from gentle grace to broad slapstick is an ankle-breaker.

Red One (2024)

November 14, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw I’ve been waiting decades for a spiritual successor to Jingle All the Way, that repugnant ode to materialism gussied up in Yuletide cheer like a corpulent whore from a Victorian stroke-book. Remember that moment in The Rundown where Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief cameo to “hand off” his action-king crown to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Turns out it was a monkey’s paw predicting the foolhardiness of them pursuing cush gigs in comic-book franchises and immortality in beloved perennial family holiday classics. How many fingers do monkeys have, anyway? Jake Kasdan’s Red One casts The Rock as humourless man of action Callum Drift. Not humourless like fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista’s brilliant turn as neurodivergent Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, humourless like a guy doing a tough-guy bit… and also a dull-guy bit, and, uh, dense, you know–disillusioned, too, because grown-ups don’t love Christmas anymore. Callum, you see, is head bodyguard to Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for I don’t fucking know, go watch it yourself. Elite L-something and Fortification or someshit; honestly, we’re both diminished just acknowledging it. Wait, “Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification.” Fuck. This is humiliating.

Robot Dreams (2023) + The Wild Robot (2024)

September 30, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, France, Music, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical

ROBOT DREAMS
****/****
based on the graphic novel by Sara Varon
written and directed by Pablo Berger

THE WILD ROBOT
**/****
screenplay by Chris Sanders, based on the book by Peter Brown
directed by Chris Sanders

by Walter Chaw Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, an adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel, has about it the sadness and loneliness of Harvey Pekar’s work. Set in a zootopia of anthropomorphic animals that’s actually New York City circa 1984, it’s about a woebegone, chonky grey dog named Dog who resorts to buying a robot for companionship in this cold metropolis. They go on walks, horse around; in an affecting moment, Robot sees lovers holding hands and takes Dog’s paw in his. He grips too hard, Dog pulls away in pain, and then, just before the scene cuts away, Dog reaches out and takes Robot’s hand again. It’s perfectly timed, sentimental but subtle, a gag paid off with a lovely grace note that doesn’t draw attention to itself–that, indeed, could be missed if one weren’t paying attention. They go to the beach together, the introverted Dog and the exuberant, animated Robot, where Dog picks out a quiet spot to put down blankets while Robot does a full back-flop into the water between a group of kids. Dog is horrified by Robot’s audacity, but Robot has won fast friends. Robot is Dog’s social confidence, his fresh outlook on the possibilities life has in store for the bright-eyed and courageously optimistic. Robot is the part of us that has died in most of us, the victim of cruel experience, and the wonder of Robot Dreams is how it doesn’t patronize the viewer with a world that conforms to the sunny expectations of a newborn. After their bucolic day at the beach, Robot rusts solid, and Dog is forced to abandon him on the now-shuttered boardwalk for an entire season.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Bookworm

July 21, 20242024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, New Zealand

**½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Michael Smiley, Nell Fisher
screenplay by Toby Harvard
directed by Ant Timpson

by Walter Chaw Kiwi jack-of-all-trades Ant Timpson’s sophomore feature after his strong hyphenate debut Come to Daddy reunites him with that film’s star, Elijah Wood. Bookworm, a quiet, charming echo of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, tells a familiar tale of wayward fathers and precocious daughters in a light, warm-hearted way. The girl is 11-year-old Mildred (Nell Fisher), and her dad is failed illusionist Strawn (Wood). When Mildred’s mother, Zo (Morgana O’Reilly), suffers a terrible accident, landing her in a coma, Strawn materializes out of the past to reunite with the child he sired but abandoned to pursue his dreams of becoming the next David Copperfield. Meanwhile, Mildred is convinced that if she can find proof of the Canterbury Panther, a legendary cryptid that allegedly lives in the New Zealand wilderness, she’ll be able to bring her mother back from the brink. Of course, the $50,000 prize money wouldn’t hurt, either. The problem is that Strawn is fairly useless as a father and even more so as an outdoorsman, but working in their favour is Mildred’s confidence and Strawn’s desire to finally do the right thing here in Mildred and Zo’s moment of crisis. Hilarity ensues.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

June 15, 20242024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Pixar, Theatrical

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

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

If (2024)

May 27, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

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

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

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

January 30, 20242023, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Jackie Chan, Japan, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit
directed by Jeff Rowe

by Walter Chaw There’s a flair to the design of Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (hereafter Mutant Mayhem)–a joy, an edginess, an energy that reminded me instantly of those halcyon MTV days of “Liquid Television”, when things like “Beavis & Butthead” would give way to “Aeon Flux”. It’s outlaw stuff, verging on the experimental, and the images are so vibrant they occasionally feel as if they’ll bounce outside the edges of the screen. I love how the colours behave like they’re refracting through a prism, like neon off the wet pavement of New York City, where the film is set. For as fresh and as the animation feels, as innovative, it’s not so ostentatious as to deviate from considerations of physics and space. It doesn’t draw attention to itself at the expense of character and story. Its hyperreality, its gloss on the new, merely lends urgency to the picture’s quotidian reality. Consider an early scene in which our heroes watch a public screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the middle of Brooklyn. Taught to be afraid of the prejudice of others, they’re hidden in the dark of a rooftop across the way. Seeing Ferris perform in a parade, they dream of what it must be like to go to high school, even of the simple camaraderie of sitting with friends on a humid summer night with a future laid out before them full of possibility rather than a life’s sentence of paranoia and rejection. Having had their fill of longing, they leave the scene, pausing before their descent into the sewers to take in the full tableau of a flickering image on a screen illuminating the crowd gathered before it.

Wonka (2023)

December 22, 20232023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Musical, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Olivia Colman, Matt Lucas, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Simon Farnaby & Paul King
directed by Paul King

by Walter Chaw Paul King’s Wonka is the sort of film upon which it’s so difficult to find purchase that it attracts critical facility: the Gene Shalit school of equivocal wordplay favoured by capsule writers and elderly sports columnists that substitutes cleverness for insight. A bad thing when there is critical insight to be mined, but some artifacts are possibly only interesting for the fact of them. About ten minutes into Wonka, I started thinking in terms of confectionary puns: how airy and light this movie is, how sugary sweet on the tongue yet troublesome for the gut. How it’s an indulgence, a gobstopper somewhat less than “everlasting.” A bean somewhere short of every-flavoured. I used to joke that there are movies that should come with an insulin plunger. And before I knew it, Wonka opened a chocolate factory, made a deal with a workforce addicted to his product (like a drug dealer, yes?), sang half a dozen songs, I bet, and then the film was over, and I remembered almost nothing about it. And so it is, and so it has remained.

Wish (2023)

November 24, 20232023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee & Allison Moore
directed by Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn

by Walter Chaw It’s possible to catch the zeitgeist express and still suck, and here’s the proof: Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck’s flaccid, disturbing, Les Miz-for-kids Disney flick, Wish. On the verge of giving her fondest wish to the autocrat King Magnifico (Chris Pine) in exchange for his beneficent magical protection, 17-year-old Asha (Ariana DeBose) discovers that Magnifico is actually a fanatical, power-drunk, authoritarian zealot. His greatest fear is that one of his people in the kingdom of Rosas may nurse a fond wish that leads to his downfall, so he hoards them, extracting them during a ritual from his people as they grow from childhood to the rest of their wish-less lives. He keeps them as bubbles of blue smoke in a glass observatory in his castle. Why doesn’t he just destroy the ones he deems dangerous?

Elemental (2023)

June 14, 2023****/****, 2023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

June 2, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

The Little Mermaid (2023)

May 30, 20232023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Melissa McCarthy
screenplay by David Magee
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw I have long, disquieting thoughts about Ursula the Sea Witch’s anatomy in the live-action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. As I understand it, with octopi, the centre of their body cavity, ringed by tentacles, is a beak. Ursula is a mermaid whose top half is human and whose bottom half is octopus–but her face doesn’t emerge from the centre of her ring of tentacles. Rather, the tentacles function as an expressive, sentient dress–like Dr. Strange’s cloak, I suppose, if we’re keeping it in the Disney family. This didn’t bother me when Ursula was a cartoon of a drag queen, but it’s bothering me now because it’s Melissa McCarthy, and what the hell is happening down there? Nightmare fuel is what’s happening down there. There’s a moment during her big number where she, like Bruce Springsteen during his Super Bowl halftime show, teabags the camera–and, friends, I was craning to catch a glimpse. What did I imagine? A chthonic, Lovecraftian horror of luminous tentacles and vagina dentata in a horror film’s ink-murk deep of shipwrecks and sharks. The scene where the title heroine, Ariel (Halle Bailey), goes to sell her voice to Ursula even begins with a hall of grasping pink “hands” springing from the walls. It’s insinuating like one of the post-rape hallucinations from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Is The Little Mermaid good? I have no idea how to answer that question.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 7, 20232022, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Family, Fantasy, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Ezra Miller, Mads Mikkelsen
screenplay by J.K. Rowling & Steve Kloves
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw I have watched and reviewed the first nine films in the Harry Potter franchise, skipping the first Fantastic Beasts sequel (though I think I saw it), and for my sins, here I am returning for the eleventh installment with nary a memory of any of them except that I liked the one directed by Alfonso Cuarón. And while I’m glad chief screenwriter Steve Kloves has secured his retirement a few hundred times over, I do lament that the writer-director of The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone didn’t make more of those kinds of movies in his nearly 40-year career. Such is the suppurative contagion of the IP age that the best minds of my generation are destroyed by the madness, starving hysterical naked–as Ginsberg might describe them–as they drag themselves through bales of ignominious piffle during their prime creative years. Is this garbage really the best use of Kloves? Of Jude Law? Of Mads Mikkelsen, Katherine Waterston, or Eddie Redmayne? The only person who deserves this mess is Ezra Miller, let’s be honest, though even Miller–if one can disregard the harm they inflict on seemingly every other human being in their orbit–is a gifted performer who’s also and obviously too good for this. These movies aren’t socially destructive in the sense that there’s something offensive about them thematically–mainly because there’s not a lot about them thematically. They’re all second acts in competing Telenovelas: breathless melodramas in which one thing bleeds into the next like cells ravaged by Ebola. There’s no hope for an end to the suffering so long as there’s money to be squeezed thick from its black buboes: another amusement-park attraction, another opportunity to be relevant in an era where tentpoles are the only currency. Was a time a film with ten sequels was regarded as a cheap joke. That time is now.

The Munsters (2022) – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Horror, Streaming

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It’s the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes’s “muse,” though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn’t get to on their own. I can’t claim Zombie’s for everyone–hell, Cassavetes ain’t for everyone, either–but he works on a specific wavelength where if you’re hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn’t get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil’s Rejects on, I’ve been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of “The Munsters” (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories–I was excited. I wish it were better.

Lightyear (2022)

June 26, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi

**/****
screenplay by Jason Headley, Angus MacLane
directed by Angus MacLane

by Walter Chaw Angus MacLane’s handsome-looking Lightyear gets enough things right that it’s unfortunate it can’t quite shake how its best parts are borrowed from Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War. It has more problems than that, granted, mainly with how its thin supporting cast fails to give the film the humour and pathos it needs to honour the by-now-familiar “heartwarming tearjerker” Pixar formula. There’s not a lot of rewatch value here, alas, and that has everything to do with Lightyear‘s awkward dialogue and inability to stick the landing–maladies, both, that afflicted co-writer Jason Headley’s previous Pixar outing, the similarly disappointing and COVID-doomed Onward. The highlight of the piece is robot cat SOX (Peter Sohn), who provides the film its credulous audience surrogate as well as its adorable animal-sidekick comic relief. By himself, SOX saves Lightyear, though he can’t elevate it above the airless jokes and pained delivery. What a shame, considering the movie sets a new bar in terms of the complexity of its digital imagery and animation. With Taika Waititi in the cast, I gotta think they could’ve hit him up for a quick joke polish.