Telluride ’15: Carol

September 8, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015

Tell15carol

**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Todd Haynes

by Walter Chaw Todd Haynes movies tend to grow on me. I expect that Carol, his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, will do the same. First pass, though, finds me considering a film adapted by a filmmaker I like from an author I adore as fully twenty minutes too long with enough fake-out climaxes and epilogues that you can almost see the air hissing out of it. Maybe it has something to do with the relative straight-forwardness of Haynes's approach here. Gone are the Sirk shrines that indicate his best work as a modern evocation of the great German expat's lush Technicolor tragedies; Carol doesn't pack the same kind of punch, because it doesn't allow us to access it as allegory. A couple of longing, lingering moments shot through snow-wet car windows and in Edward Hopper-framed hotel rooms (it's Haynes's most Wenders work), as well as a final shot that is the picture at its most evocative and unapologetically Romantic, point to the film that might have been. It could have been a more hypnotic exercise. It could have found a certain lulling rhythm in its longueurs. In Carol, the high stylization of Haynes is evoked mainly in the carefully-affected stiffness of the performances. Highsmith's prose is a delight but, freed of the awful gestalt of its pulsing drive, it proves a tall order for the cast asked to speak it.

Telluride ’15: Black Mass

September 7, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Telluride, Telluride 2015

Tell15blackmass

*½/****
starring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth
directed by Scott Cooper

by Walter Chaw I liked Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace well enough. It's miserabilist poverty porn, but it features an impressive cast doing ugly work, and I was fine with its stock pleasures as a deep genre exercise in the Next of Kin/hillbillysploitation mold. I like Black Mass considerably less. It's a cartoon with a cartoon performance by Joel Edgerton, cartoon makeup for Johnny Depp, and cartoon accents from everyone else, including a miscast Benedict Cumberbatch, tasked with sounding South Boston rather than South London c. 1882. There's a scene early on when the respectable senator played by Cumberbatch, Billy, is at home for the holidays with older brother and star of this show, Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger (Depp), that plays exactly like an outtake from Johnny Dangerously–card-cheatin', tough-talkin' Irish ma and all. It's funny. Unintentionally so, I'd wager, but in any case funny in a cruel way. Edgerton's big, showy, Townie turn as former boy from the old neighbourhood (I should say "NAY -buh–hud") turned FBI agent Johnny is also funny–for the wig, yes, but for the outrageous overacting, too. It's the first time since maybe What's Eating Gilbert Grape? that Johnny Depp has been out-hammed by someone, so at least there's that.

Telluride ’15: Suffragette

September 7, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

Tell15suffragette

½*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Abi Morgan
directed by Sarah Gavron

by Walter Chaw Focus on two scenes. The first, the pivotal moment where evil police inspector Steed (Brendon Gleeson) begs his superintendent for mercy for the brave ladies arrested while violently protesting their lack of the vote. The second, a reflective moment in which audience surrogate Maud (Carrie Mulligan), a fictionalized composite character like Charlie Sheen's in Platoon, reads a poignant book by poignant candlelight. (Seriously, she looks like a Hallmark commercial–it's really awesome.) Steed delivers his spittle-flecked, earnest-member-of-the-ruling-majority-finding-humanity-in-the-struggle-of-the-martyred-heroes speech, whereupon director Sarah Gavron, following up Brick Lane and Village at the End of the World with another IMPORTANT film, shoots a standard long shot down the middle of a stairwell. It doesn't aid the scene. It doesn't even make much sense in the context of the scene. There's no reason to establish their place in that space; there's nothing to be said about the symbolism, as both inspector and superintendent appear to be on a middle-floor level. In fact you can barely see them. It's just a pretty shot. A pretty standard shot. It shows up in a lot of student films and student-photographer portfolios. And when Maud reads a book given her by one of the real leaders of England's suffrage movement by flickering flame in an abandoned church? It's pretty thick, isn't it? Here's the clincher: the way she's sitting and holding the book, the candle is casting no illumination on the pages–but lights her up just perfectly, like a little golden angel. This is exploitation, isn't it?

Telluride ’15: 45 Years

September 6, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015, UK

Tell1545years

***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay
written and directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw Andrew Haigh's 45 Years turns on a fifty-year-old mystery that resurfaces in the week before the 45th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), causing the couple to reassess what they know of each other and their place in their relationship. It's a slow unravelling, and Haigh trusts his cast to a laudable extent. In the film's best, most visually interesting moment, he has Kate look at slides projected against a sheet in the extreme foreground. Kate herself, visible to the left of the sheet, is crammed into the eave beneath a slanted attic ceiling. Her interpretation of what she's seeing dawns on her face–creeps across it like shadows pulling back across the course of a day. It's an extraordinary moment in a film full of them. Look, too, to the scene immediately following when Kate picks Geoff up from some afternoon event, and how she holds the steering wheel while he rails on about exactly everything that isn't important. The very definition of an actor's workshop and a character drama, 45 Years attacks the idea that things get easier as you get older. Geoff's toast at their anniversary party speaks to how when one gets older life provides fewer big decisions, so all one's left with is regret at the big decisions already made. In many ways, the film is about that sort of nostalgia. In many others, it's as bitter as Make Way for Tomorrow. Imagine that film, or Tokyo Story, without children.

Telluride ’15: Steve Jobs

September 6, 2015Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

Tell15stevejobs

***/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Walter Isaacson
directed by Danny Boyle

by Walter Chaw With Aaron Sorkin dialled to “11” on the Sorkin meter and Danny Boyle doing his best impersonation of Oliver Stone circa 1994, hotly-anticipated Steve Jobs biopic Steve Jobs features an Oscar-winning (in a year without a slavery or Holocaust picture, just mail it to him) performance by Michael Fassbender in the title role of a dysfunctional Sorkin genius figure, surrounded by the Sorkin retinue of brilliant but subordinated women and various omega males. The dialogue is alive, of course, that much to be expected, but in an attempt to capture Jobs’s fragmented, hyperkinetic, probably-somewhere-on-the-autism-scale psyche, neither Boyle nor Sorkin demonstrate much in the way of restraint nor, really, much idea of what story it is that they want to tell. Some would push this scattered approach as a virtue. I see it as a good try at winnowing down a massive amount of source material into a broadly-entertaining, brisk awards-season biopic.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Whispers Behind the Wall + The Duke of Burgundy

October 19, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Thriller, UK

Whispersduke

Die Frau hinter der Wand
**½/****
directed by Grzegorz Muskala

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
***/****
written and directed by Peter Strickland

by Walter Chaw Grzegorz Muskala's moody, sexy Whispers Behind the Wall updates Matthew Chapman's little-seen but well-remembered Heart of Midnight. Both films are about a young, vulnerable, single person in a new space, discovering Monsters of the Id hiding behind the walls. Where Chapman's film tossed literal apples at a quailing Jennifer Jason Leigh, Muskala introduces vaginal holes in his hero Martin's (Vincent Redetzki) new flat, the better to hide illicit diaries and, ultimately, ease egress into the climax. More, Muskala fills Martin's never-draining bathtub with red sludge, and hides in its drain, in one of several nods to Hitchcock, the key to the whole bloody affair. It seems that Martin, a student who looks just like Ewan McGregor in Shallow Grave, has secured his new, coveted lodgings on the strength of his willingness to allow a creepy caretaker to take a shirtless picture for hot landlady Simone (Katharina Heyer). It also seems former occupant Roger has disappeared, leaving Martin to eavesdrop on Simone banging her insane boyfriend Sebastian (Florian Panzer) before finding himself in Simone's eye, in her clutches, and in her bed.

Fantastic Fest ’14: In Order of Disappearance

October 14, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Norway, Revenge, Thriller

Inorderofdisappearance

Kraftidioten
***/****
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Pål Sverre Hagen, Bruno Ganz, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw I’ve been a fan of Hans Petter Moland since his ferocious Zero Kelvin, starring a relatively unknown Stellan Skarsgård as a psychotic trapper alone with two other men in the wintry Norwegian wilderness. A wildly successful commercial director, Moland’s work is more contemplative than you might expect, considering. He was hand-picked by Terrence Malick, to give you an idea of his style, to take over The Beautiful Country for him when the director was called to another project (The New World). Moland returns to the frigid Norwegian winter with In Order of Disappearance, which opens with a man shaving, cutting a square swath through the foam on his face. Cut to the man on a giant snowplow, describing the same shape through a blanket of white. It’s a beautiful moment. Moland’s films are full of them.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Automata

October 12, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller

Automata

Autómata
*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, Birgitte Sorensen
screenplay by Gabe Ibáñez, Igora, Javier Sánchez Donate
directed by Gabe Ibáñez

by Walter Chaw Though I've seen worse movies than Gabe Ibáñez's Automata, I've also seen Automata what feels like a few dozen times. Rather than turn this into an exercise in listing source materials, however attractive shooting fish in barrels might be, best to focus on how the picture makes Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics into two (making it different!), and how its closest film analogue is probably somewhere in the junction between Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Richard Stanley's Hardware. That'll have some of you feeling pretty excited and most of you either puzzled or properly dissuaded. Yes, Automata is a muddy piece of pseudo-profundity showcasing its creators' lack of vision, discretion, and judgment. It needed at least a few more passes through the typewriter, frankly, and a mid-film appearance by a distractingly-altered Melanie Griffith–altered by real-life plastic surgery, not in-film techno-debauchery–highlights exactly how brutal the Hollywood machinery is in destroying people like her and Kim Novak and Lara Flynn Boyle and on and on. Griffith's kind of like the girl-version of Mickey Rourke at this point. There's more sadness and auto-reflection embedded in how she looks now than in anything in the film.

Fantastic Fest 14: The World of Kanako

October 9, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Japan, Mystery

Worldofkanako

***½/****
starring Koji Yakusho, Nana Komatsu, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Jo Odagiri
screenplay by Tetsuya Nakashima, Miako Tadano, Nobuhiro Monma, based on the novel by Akio Fukamachi
directed by Tetsuya Nakashima

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike's Natural Born Killers, essentially, with a bit of the old Park Chan-wook ultra-violence (or is it Shohei Imamura's A Clockwork Orange? Tarantino's Hardcore?); I'm finding it next to impossible to talk about Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako free of larger contexts, and its short-circuiting of my hard drive is perhaps intentional. The film is extremely stylish, distractingly so–or it would be if not for a central, anchoring performance from Koji Yakusho as disgraced detective Akikazu Fujishima, demolished by a long drunk and roused back to furious, ugly action by the disappearance of his daughter, Kanako (Nana Komatsu). Yakusho is so good, so grounded in his self- destruction and loathing, so extraordinary, really, from calamity to atrocity to spurious bloodletting, that watching him in this Grand Guignol is something like a true privilege. He's manifested possibly the most disgusting hero in the history of such things (Mickey Rourke's Harry Angel? Eagle scout), a creature of this dank, abattoir noir who gets progressively filthier, baser, as the picture unravels. His performance, not to gild the lily, is fucking genius.

Fantastic Fest ’14: From the Dark

October 8, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland

Fromthedark

***/****
starring Niamh Algar, Stephen Cromwell, Gerry O'Brien, Ged Murray
written and directed by Conor McMahon

by Walter Chaw Conor McMahan's From the Dark is a hell of a film. Sarah (Niamh Algar) and Mark (Stephen Cromwell) are taking a little detour into the moors when they're predictably bogged down as night approaches. What they don't know is that a peat farmer has just been summarily attacked in a stagnant pool after unearthing what appears to be some sort of bog mummy earlier in the day. It's a nifty set-up for a spam-in-a-cabin scenario, and indeed, Mark discovers a ramshackle farmhouse where he and Sarah decide to spend the night–especially once they're attacked by some unseen thing apparently repulsed by light of any kind. It's an amalgam, in other words, of The Descent and Nosferatu: a horror film resting on those genre pillars of transgression, transformation, and contagion that cannily milks every possible light source in its rural environment (cell phones, an old tube television…more would be telling) for surprise and plot points.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Over Your Dead Body

October 5, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan

Overyourdeadbody

**½/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Ko Shibasaki, Hideaki Ito, Miho Nakanishi
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike’s dip into formalism and tradition continues with Over Your Dead Body, a play-within-a-play conceit whereby star stage performer Miyuki (Ko Shibasaki) reprises the legendary role of Oiwa in the classic “Yotsuya Kaidan” and finds his off-stage relationship with co-star Kousuke (Ebizo Ichikawa) beginning to resemble the supernatural relational drama in which they’ve been cast. It’s essentially the good version of Birdman, however low a bar that might be, with Miike embracing the new, languid pace of his middle-to-later career before suggesting that maybe he’s ready to let a little of the ol’ Gozu out again. Another Audition tale of a woman wronged, Over Your Dead Body can be read by the Miike scholar as further examination of the filmmaker’s sources and inspirations while providing for the neophyte enough craft and late-in-the-game Guignol to sate most any variety of bloodlust. Yeah, it gets pretty nasty.

Fantastic Fest ’14: ABCs of Death 2

October 1, 2014Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

Abcsofdeath2

by Walter Chaw There’s a song by The Nails called “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Here are 52 lines about 26 films. Let’s go:

Amateur (***/***, d. Evan Katz)
A hitman’s plans for carrying out his contract are slick and sexy, while the reality is clumsy and ridiculous. Katz follows up Cheap Thrills with a short that shows the same comfort with gore, physical comedy, and Naked Gun causality.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Dwarves Kingdom

October 1, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals

Dwarveskingdom

***/****
directed by Matthew Salton

by Walter Chaw Here’s the thing, and I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful. At least culturally, it should be said, there’s an extreme disconnect in terms of social mores. There’s a certain directness that’s difficult to assimilate as an American, along with a certain disapproval that maybe I’m just more sensitive to because of my privileged status as neither fish nor fowl. I used to say the Chinese perfected racism because they had to learn how to be racist towards people who didn’t look substantially different from themselves. I became a case study in a graduate anthropology course once concerning the evolution of human sexuality. Asked about my object-choice apparatus (was I triggered more by distinct facial features than by hair colour, for instance, or body type?), I wasn’t offended. It’s a good question.

TIFF ’14 Wrap-Up: The Gift of MAGI and some quick takes

September 30, 2014Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

by Bill Chambers I try my best to stay away from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto’s state-of-the-art cinematheque, during the Festival, because for a goodly portion of those ten days it becomes Pandaemonium with a red carpet. But I made what I hope is a self-explanatory exception for the Industry conference “Ad Infinitum: Bigger, Faster, Brighter Movies – The Changing Creative Landscape of Digital Entertainment,” where Douglas Trumbull–who designed the lightshows for, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner; directed the cultish SF movies Silent Running and Brainstorm; and engineered Back to the Future: The Ride–debuted/previewed his new MAGI process, a digital replacement for his late, lamented Showscan. Trumbull took the podium to introduce a featurette on his work that set the context for UFOTOG, a short subject shot in 4K resolution and 3-D at 120 frames per second (fps). Although the piece dovetails with Trumbull’s geeky interest in space invaders (the title is a portmanteau of “UFO” and “photography,” just as MAGI is a weird anagram-cum-abbreviation for “moving image”), its raison d’être is to serve as MAGI’s proof of concept. Good thing, too: as a narrative, it’s pretty incoherent.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Spring

September 29, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi

Spring

***½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Vanessa Bednar, Shane Brady
screenplay by Justin Benson
directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

by Walter Chaw Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring is sensitive, smart, romantic, and disturbing in the best ways. Flip to call it Cronenberg’s Before Midnight, but how else to describe a warm, resonant relationship drama-cum-travelogue that happens to feature tentacles and extreme body mutations? It’s a compliment. Evan (a tremendous Lou Taylor Pucci) loses his mother to a wasting illness in the same week he loses his job, so he packs it up and goes to Italy, where he encounters a beautiful, mysterious woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker) who happens to have an accent he can’t place. No one could.

Fantastic Fest ’14: The Incident

September 28, 2014Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sci-Fi

Incident

El Incidente
½*/****
written and directed by Isaac Ezban

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ideas hidden in Isaac Ezban’s The Incident, packed in there amongst an impenetrable payload of dreck. It shows some promise only when it suggests William Sleator’s House of Stairs, the book it most resembles when it works. Unfortunately, the book it wants to resemble is Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, which, you know, it just doesn’t. It’s the tale of two time loops following a mysterious celestial explosion: the first strands a pair of petty robbers and their cop pursuer in an Escher painting, while the second strands a squabbling, awful family on an endless highway TO NOWHERE. Portents and signs everywhere hang low like significantly meaningful storm clouds, leading to a thirty-minute exposition–in what feels like the fourth or fifth hour of a hundred-minute film–that’s delivered with the careful precision of a slow adult explaining something s/he doesn’t entirely understand to a slow child. Painful? It’s at least painful. Ironic, too, that this movie about temporal looping makes you a victim of it.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Everly

September 27, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Revenge, Thriller

Everly

½*/****
starring Salma Hayek, Jennifer Blanc, Togo Igawa, Gabriella Wright
screenplay by Yale Hannon
directed by Joe Lynch

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a brutal, just-offscreen gang-rape perpetrated on hooker Everly (Salma Hayek) by a gaggle of Yakuza scumbags. Escaping into the bathroom, Everly retrieves a pistola, secreted away The Godfather-like, tries to call her mother and the daughter she’s never known on her cell, and then goes all spree-killer on her tormentors. But Everly is neither a rape-revenge flick nor a declaration of feminism, really, what with its constantly declaring every single woman character a “whore” in its first half-hour. No, what Joe Lynch’s reductive, big-dumb flick is, is a sub-Robert Rodriguez ripper, marking it as sub-sub-Tarantino. To be fair, it also rips off, shot for shot, moments from Sam Raimi; from Reservoir Dogs in a poor, bleeding-out schlub dubbed “Dead Man” (Akie Kotabe), who fans of “The Simpsons” will recognize as Frank Grimes; and from Luc Besson, in particular (and if you’re a carbon copy of Besson, the image fidelity is a field of giant pixels at this point). There’s so little imagination in the imitation, in fact, that the director himself has described his picture as “Die Hard with boobs.” Classy.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Wyrmwood + Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

September 26, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Australia, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Norway, Zombie

Wyrmwooddeadsno2

WYRMWOOD
**/****
directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Død Snø 2
***/****
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Walter Chaw Zombie movies are pretty played-out by now, strung out to the point of zombie romances, but I feel like there’s room, yet, for innovation. Alas, neither Kiah Roache-Turner’s Wyrmwood nor Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead does much to reinvent the wheel, although both seem to know and appreciate their sources. Start with Wyrmwood‘s faithfulness to the frenetic vibe of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, stirred in with some of the costuming and road-play of the “Mad Max” series, in its tale of a zombie invasion that leads to the partnering-up of Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Benny (Leon Burchill). When Barry’s sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) gets abducted by an evil Save the Green Planet! extra and sent along an endless highway with newly-developed powers, it’s up to Barry and Benny to splatter a couple hundred zombies to save her bacon.

Fantastic Fest ’14: John Wick

September 25, 2014Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Revenge, Thriller

Johnwick

***½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw Essentially a remake of Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life shot through with oodles of late-’80s John Woo gunplay, stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick is, damnit, really just so much fun. Existing in a fascinating universe that marks it as one of the better comic-book adaptations without origins in an actual comic book, it features Keanu Reeves as the titular angry guy, taking on the Russian mob because they killed his dog. That’s it. The way John Wick gets from point A to point B, though, with a reliance on what appear to be practical effects and a strong, smart use of Reeves’s sinewy grace and muscularity, is a thing of action-movie beauty. Ultimately, it’s a showcase for elaborate stunt-work and fight choreography, and, because I’m starting to think of Stahelski’s film like the films directed by Yuen Wo Ping, that’s totally all right.