M3gan 2.0 looking apologetic: “'I’m sorry for MeToo-ing your Teddy Ruxpin but he had it coming.'”

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Horror, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Jemaine Clement
written and directed by Gerald Johnstone

by Walter Chaw Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 feels like one of those 1980s teensploitation sci-fi adventure flicks. D.A.R.Y.L., for instance–D.A.R.Y.L. exactly, let’s face it. Given that D.A.R.Y.L. hardly set the world on fire, this does not bode well for M3GAN 2.0. To its credit, it takes a wild swing at relevance, M3GAN 2.0 does, in a way that’s at complete odds with what drove the first film’s safe swing at relevance, pushing this sequel into Spies Like Us/Volunteers territory. Or Best Defense, why not? All those musty Cold War artifacts of the Reagan era that looked for humor in entrenched doomsday scenarios; closed-system satires that don’t have much to say because there’s no way out–that don’t have much room to satirize anything because you can’t make the “stupid Apocalypse” any stupider than the idiots heralding it have already made it. M3GAN 2.0 plays a lot like a Naked Gun prologue, in fact, one that opens with a spybot assassinating a brown baddie in a ridiculous stalking and ends in a bump-off that’s just a little too violent to be horrible. It’s a joke everyone’s in on, told with an arched eyebrow and a whiff of “the call is coming from inside the house,” The Matrix Resurrections-style. This is payback for all the notes. This is payback for thinking this is a franchise.

Christopher Abbott with a flashlight peering through a barred window in Wolf Man

Wolf Man (2025) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Posted in2025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Horror, Ireland, New Zealand, Werewolf

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
written by Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In his 2020 book Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, author Craig Ian Mann charts the evolution of werewolf mythology from the Middle Ages on to show how the metaphorical purpose of werewolves shifted with each new epoch. In medieval times, they were sinners wearing their transgressions on the outside; during the Inquisition, they were presented as witches in disguise. Enlightenment dismisses the werewolf as religious hokum, but it comes roaring back in the Romantic period as a psychological concept indicating our tempestuous natures, and cinema is born soon enough afterwards to freeze this take in amber. In movies, werewolves are typically a Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit in which the bestial side of some hapless schmo is temporarily unleashed. The particulars change, of course. Sometimes, a bite portends a transformation, one usually governed by the lunar cycle. Sometimes, the werewolf infection is an inherited curse. Sometimes, as in Sam Katzman’s ten-cent wonder The Werewolf, it’s a matter of science gone awry. The zeitgeist, too, can alter our perception of the werewolf, and periodically renew its currency. 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, for instance, reflected the moral panic over juvenile delinquents, as Mann notes, while 1985’s Teen Wolf was, in its incoherent way, another of the decade’s cautionary tales about getting high on your own supply.

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Nathaniel Lees
written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft, based on the short story by Owen Marshall
directed by James Ashcroft

by Waler Chaw James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen scares the shit out of me. Not just as a horror movie, but also as a reminder of how our elder-care system is so broken that most of us will end up dying at the hands of overworked caregivers in underfunded facilities. My plan is to kill myself before the dementia takes over completely, but that boat may have already sailed. In The Rule of Jenny Pen, Eunice (Hilary Norris), a dear old thing, believes that every day is Christmas, and tells everyone her family is due to visit. Every day ends with her disappointed, but then she wakes up the next morning thinking it’s Christmas again, thus hope springs eternal. We later learn that she’s been in this loop for years. Is she in Hell or is she in Heaven? Is anticipation sweet, or is it torture? Was Sisyphus happy because he knew what was expected of him? At a terminal point, is there much difference between sweet delight and endless night? Is there much of a difference between this limbo in God’s waiting room and the limbo of lives meted out in coffee spoons and the long shadows of regret?

Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Maxxxine

The Exorcism (2024) + Maxxxine (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE EXORCISM
*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, David Hyde Pierce
written by M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller
directed by Joshua John Miller

MAXXXINE
**½/****
starring Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Joshua John Miller is Hollywood royalty: the son of actor/playwright Jason Miller (best known as The Exorcist‘s Father Damien Karras) and grandson of bang-zoom Jackie Gleason. He’s vampire royalty, too, having played foul, bitter Homer in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark around the same time his brother Jason Patric headlined Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys as almost-turned heartthrob Michael, making Joshua John ideal for helming a film about the goings-on behind the scenes of a genre flick. The film-within-a-film in his The Exorcism is codenamed “The Georgetown Project,” a requel/redux/remake of The Exorcist in which Russell Crowe’s Tony Miller, a broken-down, widowed, recently in his cups actor seeking a comeback, essays a role very much like Father Karras while hoping to reconcile with his offscreen daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins), who has come to live with him after being kicked out of school. The director is unctuous piece of shit Peter (Adam Goldberg), whose main motivating tactic for Tony is to remind him of Tony’s multiple failures as a human being while dangling his career in front of the lumpen actor like a spider over a Jonathan Edwardsian abyss. Credit Crowe for making Tony’s humiliation feel so familiar and lived-in that even his flinches from Peter’s gut punches are understated and resigned.

Bookworm

Fantasia Festival ’24: Bookworm

Posted in2024, 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.

The Flash (2023)

Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

Theflash2023

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti’s jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that’s extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree–caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on–and some of it is due to Miller’s performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav’s anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller’s name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I’m not equipped to judge people who won’t watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Ireland, New Zealand, Theatrical

Evildeadrise

***/****
starring Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise is mean. It’s that scene from The Exorcist (1973) where little Regan McNeil masturbates with a crucifix and then shoves her mom’s face into her crotch mean. Vicious. But it’s not Ari Aster mean, where you infer it hates its characters and/or its genre. Rather, it’s mean in the sense that demons are mean, and it makes people we like do terrible things to other people we like. Evil Dead Rise is the line separating a horror film from a horrible film. It’s closer in tenor to its immediate predecessor, Fede Alvarez’s similarly vicious–brutal, really–Evil Dead (2013), than to Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, though more to the point, it’s exactly as mean as the first two entries in that trilogy but without Raimi’s sillier visual affectations and Bruce Campbell’s beloved caricature of a hambone persona. Indeed, most of the “fun” of those Campbell/Raimi pictures is the amount of humiliation and abuse heaped upon Campbell, with Campbell’s physical resemblance to a cartoon character becoming the central gag of the third film, Army of Darkness, as his features are stretched and multiplied, shrunken and deformed to fit whatever comic-strip setup is required of him in that moment.

SDAFF ’22: Millie Lies Low

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Sdaff22millielieslow

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill’s hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It’s an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She’s Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane’s on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can’t get back on without a new ticket she can’t afford. Unable to accept that she’s made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she’s made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she’s left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral–all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

TIFF ’21: Earwig + Night Raiders

Posted in2021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

Tiff21earwignightraiders

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

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

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

Telluride ’21: The Power of the Dog

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

Tell21powerofthedog

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

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

Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

Posted in2021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, New Zealand, War

Shadowinthecloud

***/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Beulah Koae, Taylor John Smith, Nick Robinson
written by Max Landis and Roseanne Liang
directed by Roseanne Liang

by Walter Chaw Roseanne Liang’s Shadow in the Cloud opens with a vintage training cartoon for WWII flyboys about the dangers of gremlins clogging their bombers’ works, indicating that whatever this film seems like it’s going to be about, it’s going to have a monster in it. And it’s inevitable, once you know that, for you to think about how one of the episodes recreated for Twilight Zone: The Movie was “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which a gremlin on the wing of a plane terrorizes a nervous flier. And then how John Landis co-directed that film (though not that segment) and, through unimaginable carelessness compounded by his unfettered ego and well-documented lack of a moral compass, instructed a helicopter pilot to fly too low over illegal pyrotechnics, resulting in the chopper’s crash and the brutal death of leading man Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Child actors who shouldn’t have been working at that time of night due to labour laws, as it happens, but, shhh!: an artiste is at work. It’s all on video (Zapruder-esque footage of the crash aired multiple times on the 6 o’clock news), there was a trial with damning testimony, the film’s producers–including Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy–fled the country and refused to testify (because, in Spielberg’s case, he was “too important” to do so (the judge agreed)), and then, the world the way that it is, Landis got off. He even went to Morrow’s funeral uninvited to spew some blubbery words, and now, in the late-Leni Reifenstahl phase of his career, he’s treated like an elder statesman allowed to reframe his legacy. Let me help you with that. His legacy is three things, each of them true: he is the director of An American Werewolf in London and a couple of obnoxious comedies people like for some reason; he is a murderer; and he is the father of one of the all-too-predictably worst people on the planet.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)|The Grudge (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in2019, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Christmas, Horror, Malaysia, Mystery, New Zealand, Nicolas Cage, Portugal, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Grudge 1

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that’s particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They’re fairy tales, fables. They’re warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they’re how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species’ survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don’t come home if they’re caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades–each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

Guns Akimbo (2020)

Posted in****/****, 2020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Germany, New Zealand, Theatrical, UK

Gunsakimbo

****/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu, Rhys Darby
written and directed by Jason Lei Howden

by Walter Chaw One of my favourite stories–much-embellished, probably, by its author–is Fritz Lang’s account of being called into Propaganda Minister Goebbels’s office in 1933 to be told that Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was going to be censored, alas, but would Lang like to be in charge of Nazi-run movie studio UFA? It’s funny because Lang had bankrupted UFA six years prior with the colossal flop that was Metropolis–an event that made UFA vulnerable to its eventual takeover. For context, during those last days of the Weimar, Leni Riefenstahl was the freshly-installed head of the Nazi Film Commission and had that year shot the annual Nuremberg Rally on behalf of her greatest admirer, Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl was a genius-level filmmaker eventually given more resources–the support of an entire industrialized nation–than arguably any other filmmaker received before or since. She used it to coin new ways of looking at things. When you watch a professional football game now, well, Riefenstahl set the stage for that. Star Wars, too.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)

Posted in2019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Christmas, Horror, Malaysia, Mystery, New Zealand, Nicolas Cage, Portugal, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Blackxmasgrudgecoloroutofspace

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that’s particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They’re fairy tales, fables. They’re warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they’re how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species’ survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don’t come home if they’re caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades–each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Posted in2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Czech Republic, Drama, New Zealand, Satire, Scarlett Johansson, War

Jojorabbit

*/****
starring Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Taika Waititi, based on the book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is an instantly divisive film sure to inflame not for being divisive in and of itself, but possibly because it's not divisive enough. It's a feel-good, warmhearted movie about, however tangentially, the Holocaust, earning it immediate unkind comparisons in some quarters to Life is Beautiful; and it's a satire of the simple-minded venality of Nazism and white supremacy, thus earning it kinder comparisons to The Great Dictator. In truth, it's both: it's unforgivably light, given its subject, and it's effectively unfortunately broad in its condemnation of Nazis, though considering Nazis are once again a thing and the "good guys" are advocating for giving them a spot at the ideological table, I mean…can anything be dumbed-down and obvious enough? By the same token, the issue I have with Jojo Rabbit is its essential hopefulness: the belief that people who adopt certain toxic ideas and ideologies can ever change. I think it's possible but exceedingly rare. Jojo Rabbit believes the opposite: that horrible ideas can flare, even flourish, for a time, but that the essential decency of humanity will save us. Waititi is Rousseau. I am Hobbes. Jojo Rabbit only offends me in its suggestion that there are good Nazis worth saving. This is admittedly more my shortcoming than the film's.

FrightFest ’18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

Posted in****/****, 2018, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Interviews, Lebanon, New Zealand, Revenge, Short Films, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Vampire

Frightfest18pie

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

Ghost in the Shell (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mystery, New Zealand, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Ghostshell1

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Fraud + Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Short Films

Ff16possesion

FRAUD
***½/****
directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp

BELIEF: THE POSSESSION OF JANET MOSES
**½/****
directed by David Stubbs

by Walter Chaw The line between documentary and fiction filmmaking is blurry. Better–more accurate–to say there’s no difference at all: that documentary is just a genre in and of itself. Documentaries are products of points of view, of editing, of premise. You could film someone reading a phone book, but even that’s a choice. Where to put the camera; why do it in the first place? Consider the Heisenberg Principle as well, this notion that the nature of anything changes once it’s observed. Documentary as “truth” is an interesting philosophical question. It’s sold as such, used politically, manipulated to serve purposes contrary to the idea of objective reality, but documentaries are never objective. Indeed, they challenge the very idea that the product of any endeavour could be truly objective. It’s an interesting phenomenon in our technological wasteland that video “evidence” of malfeasance has proven inconclusive in courts of law. Replays in professional sports have only muddied the playing field. Everything is subject to interpretation and the product of someone’s decision made somewhere along the way.