Fantasy Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

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?

Barbie (2023)

July 22, 20232023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Satire, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Will Ferrell
written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Margot Robbie is so good in good movies–and she’s also in Greta Gerwig’s smug, self-congratulatory, painfully obvious, subtext-free screed Barbie, playing Mattel’s signature doll-for-girls, which, despite occasional attempts at empowerment, are still primarily thought of as regressive artifacts of a reductionist patriarchy. Does this review immediately sound like a didactic thesis more appropriate for a freshman-level gender-studies course? One that condescends to presume neither prior knowledge nor scholarship but rather hopes to build consensus through the most basic of shared sociological experiences, catchphrases, and facile platitudes? Well, fight fire with fire, I guess. It’s tough to sit through populist groaners like Barbie because it’s right about the wrongs it’s angry about, but in the act of being right, it validates the criticisms of the worst people in the world–a strident preach to the choir that embitters the villains while actually showing those same incels, rapists, corporate stooges, and other clinically-twisted narcissists an uncomfortable amount of grace and mercy. I’m sympathetic, don’t get me wrong. But while I think it’s a long and rocky road to make something thorned and substantive out of a corporate icon under the supervision and financial control of said corporation, I’m of the mind that you might have been better off asking, say, Andrea Arnold to give it a go instead of Gerwig. Someone good, I mean. That is, if you were ever really serious about meaningful subversion as opposed to the stealth launch of your plastic-based cinematic universe using a name with a perplexing niche pedigree as the frictionless, candy-coated disguise for your rapacious intentions.

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.

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.

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

May 6, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Finland, Horror, Theatrical, VOD, War

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn’t an embarrassing high concept. His years on “Robot Chicken” and “Moral Orel” demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far–between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield–McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter (“splat-stick?”) flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There’s a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

April 8, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Iceland, Sports, Theatrical, UK, VOD

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron’s pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill–a personal Chekhov’s Gun, if you will. It’ll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly’s Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne’er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend’s sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

Dragonslayer (1981) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

March 23, 2023****/****, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own

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

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson, Chloe Salaman
screenplay by Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins
directed by Matthew Robbins

by Walter Chaw When I first reviewed Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer upon its DVD release 20 years ago, I said the picture could be read as an allegory for the passing of the 1970s and, with it, the auteur-driven New American Cinema, which was losing favour to the blockbuster mentality that dominates Hollywood production to this day. The directors were the wizards, tied to their decrepit and pain-ridden dragons, and they were, in 1981, up against the reality of an administration perpetuated by a myth of American exceptionalism that would serve as a course correction from the predominantly downbeat, paranoid films of the previous decade. I don’t know that I’ve gotten any smarter in the years following my initial assessment of a work that has been dear to me since I saw it as a terrified eight-year-old, cowering beneath my seat in the long-defunct and paved-over Lakeside Twin, but I do know I’ve gotten measurably more pessimistic about our prospects. I think you can know things are broken when you’re young (and 29 didn’t seem so young at the time, but it is) without knowing how irreparably broken they are. And you can feel hopeless without knowing just how hopeless. When I watch Dragonslayer in 2023, I see a work about the rise of Christofascism and the prosperity gospel, about governments we trust to protect us making deals with monsters to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of the people who rely on them, and about the steady eradication of belief that there are any heroes left with the will or the wherewithal to save us.

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.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

December 13, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw The discourse leading up to James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (hereafter Avatar 2) has been largely about how although the first Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time, it hasn’t left much of a mark on popular culture. It’s a take derided for the evidence of the numbers and the emergence of a theme-park attraction, though I do wonder if its cultural impact isn’t like that Song of the South ride “Splash Mountain,” which is only just now, finally, closing in early 2023. I don’t know that the vile myth of the happy enslaved person made much of a mark on popular culture, either, insomuch as it is, itself, already and essentially popular culture. Maybe Avatar didn’t make much of a “cultural impact” because it didn’t introduce any new ideas into the ecosystem while profiting from a few antiquated ones. In the interim between Avatar‘s release in 2009 and this first of four promised sequels, a lot has changed in terms of cultural tolerances–even if, systemically, things have not only not improved but regressed. Maybe the problem with Avatar is the same one that any stories about first contact with a technologically less sophisticated alien culture share, given how our historical templates for these narratives involve genocide and the pillaging of natural resources. When a white person tells a story of a white man saving an indigenous culture from other white men, however, I start to worry about what kind of fetish is being indulged, and to what purpose/at what cost. What’s not in doubt is that Avatar 2 will make bank, because whatever kink is being indulged in white-saviour narratives has proven a durable and profitable one in a white nationalist state. That’s one way to look at it, anyway.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

August 26, 20222022, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Pia Thunderbolt, Berk Ozturk
screenplay by George Miller & Augusta Gore, based upon the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale” by A.S. Byatt
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing raises impossibly tangled issues around representation in its tale of a “narratologist” who releases a Djinn from his bottle and wishes he would love her as she, instantly, loves him. Based on a short story by A.S. Byatt, part of a five-part cycle that seeks to navigate the rocky wasteland between colonist and colonized, the victor and the appropriated, Miller’s picture is a story about a specific point of view that can never be entirely separated from itself. Whatever the best intentions invested in bridging cultural gaps, the process of absorption and reinterpretation tends to result in diminishment. The things that are most precious in our stories are ephemeral and shy. They’re like exotic zoo specimens: they don’t travel well and, once imprisoned, wither and die. But like anything judged to be rare and, through its rareness, authentic, stories belonging to others continue to be collected, no matter the damage collection does to them. Mulan, Aladdin… The popular conversation around them has swung so completely into their Disneyfication that Niki Caro, the not-Asian director of the live-action Mulan, based on one of China’s most-revered folk heroes, said there “is another culture at play here, the culture of Disney.” Unlike Mulan, however, Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a work by a white, Yorkshire-born British woman (a Dame, no less), and I think it’s not so much an attempt to colonize 1001 Arabian Nights as it is an ethical adaptation of a piece primarily interested in how the West has sought meaning for itself through the Orientalization of the cultures it’s exploited for centuries.

The Northman (2022)

April 12, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers’s latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There’s even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film’s settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers’s previous film, The Lighthouse, and it’s the first of his movies that doesn’t require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

March 31, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents’ story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It’s an immigrant story–a typical one, I’ve come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it’s a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn’t approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them–they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to “break” my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don’t know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I’m broken. I’m working on fixing it.

Turning Red (2022)

March 12, 20222022, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Streaming

**/****
screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
directed by Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw There’s a classic ONION article where an Asian San Francisco dry cleaner is picketed for upholding harmful Asian stereotypes that I think about a lot–especially when I wonder what would happen if I ever wrote something about my experiences with a domineering mother and a father who often stood by and watched when I could’ve used a champion. There are so few representations of Asian-Americans in American film that the other edge of that sword of getting a shot at telling a story is, what if the story we tell is merely a (hopefully) more nuanced version of the same old shit? Asian women are slotted into two types by this culture: prostitutes and dragon ladies–the assumption being that the former eventually ages into the latter. They are fetish objects with their own category in porn and shorthands for stentorian parenting and management styles, heavy on the scolding and light on the positive affirmation. These stereotypes arise from WWII GI encounters with brothels in Pacific war zones and a myth of Asian exceptionalism constructed to pit Asians against Blacks in the United States. I have seen white versions of these characters as well (both the whore and the drill sergeant-as-mom), but I have also seen the entire range of human possibility expressed through white faces and bodies in the same films. What I have not seen is a similar courtesy extended to minority characters. One dragon lady in a movie filled with other Asian faces and experiences is fine; it wouldn’t even be unrealistic. When it’s the only characterization, however, it’s a problem that actually gets people murdered. I mean, no one watches Carrie and thinks Mrs. White is a stand-in for all white mothers.

All the Moons (2020) – Shudder

February 10, 2022****/****, 2020, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, France, Spain, Streaming, Vampire

Ilargi Guztiak
****/****
starring Haizea Carneros, Josean Bengoetxea, Itziar Ituño, Zorion Eguileor
written by Igor Legarreta, Jon Sagalá
directed by Igor Legarreta

by Walter Chaw The Catholic Church has an outsized influence in the events of the last couple of centuries. They have increasingly occupied the role of collective boogeyman in the West as we start to reckon with the consequences of Manifest Destiny, the Age of Exploration, and the attempts to eradicate indigenous peoples in the name of a wrathful God too small to allow other faiths. The mission project in the West, the Residential schools designed to separate children from their cultures in the name of a monoculture arrayed around a cannibalistic blood cult steeped in atrocities committed under the banner of their notion of Heaven. The Magdalene laundries in Europe, the sexual abuse scandals so rampant they’re less scandals than functions of a diseased system that shelters monsters, shuffling them around to unsuspecting diocese to avoid coming clean about the extent of their callow predation. The church has aligned itself with the “pro-life” movement in the United States, a fanatical and radicalized cult invested in the oppression of women and sexuality. Heavily politicized, they suckle at the public teat and continue a baked-in tradition of profiting greatly from the fear and loathing of the very poor, the very desperate, the very stupid. Every new revelation is met with obfuscation, denial, and obstruction instead of a willingness to shine light into the corners of their unresolvable, bestial intolerance and sinfulness. Throughout history, the Catholic Church, as an organization, has proved emblematic of absolute power corrupting absolutely. It’s become a synecdoche for abuse. Of course, this makes it a fertile plot where fulsome gardens of horror can grow.

Eternals (2021)

October 27, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch–which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota’s most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it’s the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige’s desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn’t matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren’t generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what’s happening and a hired gun who’s pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it’s pretty clear that Zhao’s empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

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.

Luca (2021)

June 16, 20212021, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa’s Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called “Porto Rosso” in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki’s Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca‘s message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn’t, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they’re afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It’s tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it’s clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It’s there if you want it.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

April 22, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada
screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham
directed by Simon McQuoid

by Walter Chaw I saw Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 Mortal Kombat movie on opening night at a two-screen strip-mall theatre in Seattle with my friends Keith, Sam, and Dan. We knew the catchphrases from endless nights playing the game on a Sega Genesis, and we shouted them in jubilant concert like a Catholic callout and response. Since we were also fans of Highlander, the casting of Christopher Lambert as another ageless super-being felt exactly right. We were assholes. It was the best time of our lives. They were my groomsmen when I got married a few years later. Time has scattered us; Sam killed himself a couple of years ago. It all starts feeling like the framing story for Stand by Me. What’s left are memories like this, which seem the easiest way now to get a movie project off the ground–a strip-mining of nostalgia that speaks more to a generational experience of loss than to a real paucity of imagination. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t keep happening, and our deathless hunger for polyglot mosaics in pursuit of personal white rabbits is symptomatic of our despair.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

March 19, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Superhero

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It opens with soundwaves visualized as ripples in the air–Superman’s (Henry Cavill) death cry touching every part of a blasted world as the protection and decency he represents is murdered. I have historically hated Zack Snyder’s vision of this universe because it felt grimdark in a weightless way, the posturing of an emo teenager who hasn’t earned his weariness and cynicism. It felt like a put-on. Immature. When the worst parts of comic fandom coalesced to demand a director’s cut of a genuinely abominable film, Justice League, I, partly out of self-protection from a hateful horde and partly out of a sense of moral superiority, looked upon the project as first impossible, then misguided. I thought myself better than all this, which is unforgivable. I guess I wanted to believe that in a world in which I have figured nothing out, I had at least figured out that anything championed by trolls and incels could have no possible value to someone like me–who, of course, has nothing in common with these troglodytes except, you know, for the loneliness and the self-loathing and the suspicion of corporate-think. Maybe it’s just fear that makes me as hateful as they are. And maybe it’s just fear that makes them as hateful as they are, too. I think what’s most surprising to me about Zack Snyder’s Justice League (hereafter ZSJL) is how skillful it is as a diagnosis of the horrific, unfillable void that drives the very population most responsible for its existence. If the messages of the film are internalized, it may even help.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

March 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, VOD

****/****
screenplay by Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim
directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

by Walter Chaw I’ve thought a lot lately about quitting, and seriously, this thing I’ve done over the last twenty-some years–this thing that started, ultimately, because I was a kid who couldn’t speak the language and wanted desperately to belong to something that would never have me on my terms. I’ve thought about quitting, and it’s a dangerous thing for someone like me to think that way. Movies were a thing I loved that never betrayed me, never abandoned me, whenever there was pain or confusion, or something I needed to work through; this was the art form that was primary for me as a catalyst for introspection. There’s literature and music and poetry, of course, yet film could encompass all of those things. It’s saved my life a time or two. I thought I had a place among others who loved it like me, but no one loves it like me–people love it like they love it. Or they just use it because they’ve failed at everything else and don’t have the introspection to feel despair. When you give yourself over to an idea of affiliation through the appreciation of objects, you’re doomed to disappointment and loneliness. When a person like me thinks about quitting, he’s thinking about cutting the line that connects him to his life. I’ve been thinking about quitting, because what’s the point of any of it when your rope is tied to a quintessence of dust? I don’t trust this anymore.

Sundance ’21: Cryptozoo

February 2, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Sundance

*/****
written and directed by Dash Shaw

by Walter Chaw I rail a lot about how animation is a genre in the United States instead of a medium, how the Japanese have it all figured out and we Americans are at least a generation behind. Now here’s graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw, following up his better–or at least more focused–My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with the oddly blissed-out eco-adventure flick Cryptozoo. What’s clear is that this, more than his previous stuff, is an attempt to ape Japanese director Ujicha’s hand-drawn nightmare/cutout style from stuff like the indelible The Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager. What Shaw hasn’t successfully ported over is Ujicha’s kineticism–that sense of propulsive, compulsive, nightmarish energy that confers upon his films a weird, repulsive energy. Watching Ujicha’s films is like accidentally touching a sea cucumber. I reached into an opaque bag of Wonder Bread that I found in a cabin once and drew back, in revulsion, a hand covered in bright green slime. That’s Ujicha. Cryptozoo is a movie that feels like it was based on one of the breathless stories Juliet and Pauline would have made up over a lazy summer’s day in Heavenly Creatures. Just a long string of terribly important things tied together by “and then and then and this and also this” narrative exposition.

The Goonies (1985) + Beetlejuice (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 6, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Family, Fantasy, Spielberg

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p versions

THE GOONIES
*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Richard Donner

Beetle Juice
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A-
starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren
directed by Tim Burton

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw and Alex Jackson already covered The Goonies and Beetlejuice (hereafter Beetle Juice), respectively, for our humble little website, I feel obliged to say something about these films before moving on to the technical portion of this review. Firstly, I don’t think I’d seen The Goonies from beginning to end since the ’80s, and it took me a week to get through it this time. I summed up the experience on Letterboxd as “like being buried alive in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese,” which was equally true no matter where I started from; The Goonies is just so screamy. To a certain extent, that’s verisimilitude–this is, after all, a movie about a gaggle of teens and preteens on a treasure hunt, hopped up on sugar, hormones, and the fantasy of instant wealth. But it isn’t merely that they’re rambunctious–they’re also mean.

Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2020****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2019, 2020, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Cronenberg, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Television, Thriller, Werewolf

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen’s score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore’s work that if I didn’t know better… Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What’s sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they are–so like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well as–here’s another German term for you–overwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979’s Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zone‘s release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a “name” composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall. I don’t think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, who’s idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, you’ll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and that’s true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, I’m seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenberg’s voice echoed in my own.

Dolittle (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 6, 20202020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Fantasy

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it’s worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, “it” being a scene from Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing “pieces” summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan’s Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It’s played for laughs, but I wasn’t laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy’s accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who’s been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn’t for you, it’s for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.

Onward (2020)

March 6, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, Keith Bunin
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Walter Chaw Onward is notable not because it features Disney/Pixar’s first LGBTQ character (a cop–Jesus, you guys–voiced by Lena Waithe), but because it’s the family-friendly studio’s first stoner comedy. Dan Scanlon’s follow-up to his middling Monsters University is an unholy amalgam of Detroit Rock City and Weekend at Bernie’s that finds two elf brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), going on a quest to resurrect the top half of their dead dad’s body for the one magical day they’ve conjured for him via an ancient spell and a “phoenix crystal,” the double for which serves as the film’s exhausted MacGuffin after they squander the first one. The setting is an industrialized world where there was once magic; as technology became easier than memorizing spells and perfecting belief, magic was left to lie fallow, just waiting for a winsome young elf with father and confidence issues to reintroduce it to the world. You can read this a few ways. The way I’m choosing to interpret “magic” is as a metaphor for the American progressive movement, which died at the end of the Sixties with a series of assassinations. If we lay this over Onward, then the film becomes a call to action for progressives in this country to rally after decades of being buried under the inequities of late capitalism.