Life During Wartime #27: DON’T LOOK NOW (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Don't Look Now (1973) U.S.: Kanopy, Pluto TV Canada: rental only My daughter remembers seeing the first minute of this film years ago when she was a kid, walking by just as I was starting it. She remembers a little girl in a red rain slicker, and a white horse galloping past in the background. She remembers how this alone made her feel uneasy enough, after asking a couple of questions, to tap out. As I've said many times before, our philosophy with our kids was that they could watch anything they want, but there was a price:…

SlipStreams Vol. 2

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Four random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL's Walter Chaw for the week of June 17, 2022.PICK OF THE WEEKThe Chocolate War (1988 (U.S.: Prime, Paramount+, Epix, Hoopla, Tubi, DirecTV; Canada: Hoopla, Tubi, MGM))An adaptation of Robert Cormier's YA classic from that pre-Harry Potter period when YA wasn't nearly so fulsome or populated, Keith Gordon's pitch-black The Chocolate War covers a fundraising drive at a private Catholic school that, more than a decade before Alexander Payne's Election, takes vicious satirical aim at the thin skin of civilization stretched over our animal natures. In meanness, the film falls somewhere between Williams…

SlipStreams Vol. 1

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Four random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL editor Bill Chambers for the week of June 10, 2022.PICK OF THE WEEKThe Clock (1945 (U.S., Canada: The Criterion Channel))For my money, the peak of Judy Garland's collaborations with Vincente Minnelli, not counting Liza. Replacing director Fred Zinnemann a few weeks into production (at Garland's behest), Minnelli scrapped most of Zinnemann's footage and started fresh with an eye towards shooting more of the picture on location in New York, making The Clock one of Minnelli's rare excursions into something resembling realism. The precursor to truncated romances like Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, The Clock's…

Life During Wartime #27: SE7EN (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Se7en (1995) U.S.: Peacock, Peacock Premium Canada: Starz (Crave, Amazon) My son is very protective of his experience. He's come to some horror films late. My daughter, who's now 18, is much more adventurous. Still, she's stayed away from Se7en until now. There are a few films like this that her mother and I have strongly discouraged her from watching. I have a long list of red flags, stuff like the Italian animal-cruelty/found-footage flicks, which I don't think offer anything of value beyond shock and dismay, as well as great world masterpieces like Salò, The Glass Cage, and…

“The 50 Best Witch Movies” by Walter Chaw

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I'm terrified of witches. I'm afraid of mermaids, too, but I stay off the ocean generally because of the whole shark thing. Sirens, same. And banshees--I think they're in Scotland mostly, right? But living in Colorado makes wilderness difficult to avoid. No doubt the way I associate witches with the wild has something to do with a fear of female sexuality. More specifically, witches are what men accuse women of being when women pose a danger to them--when women get a little too close to coming fully into their power as disruptors of systemic masculine order. Accused of rape, adultery,…

Life During Wartime #26: APOCALYPSE NOW (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Apocalypse Now (1979) U.S.: Purchase only Canada: Purchase only My 18-year-old daughter, Mia, is graduating college this year. She's always been adventurous in her movie-watching tastes, but being in a competitive program at school means her time during the school year for watching things is limited by hours of coursework. When she was younger, she used to go with me to seminars I was teaching as part of continuing-education courses at the local college. Through them, she's seen about 40 of Hitchcock's 54 or so films and, I would say, the bulk of The Archers' output. We…

Life During Wartime #25: THE GODFATHER (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw The Godfather (1972) U.S.: Fubo, Showtime, DirecTV, Spectrum Canada: Paramount+ My daughter turned 18 last month and my son just got his driver's permit, so I've never felt more mortal--not even when my dad died. (When that happened, my daughter was a month away from being born.) Not even when my in-laws died, because the labour of supporting my wife and kids through their grief mitigated the arc of my own. Not even when I got a few scary medical diagnoses, causing me to change my diet and habits, or when my mom was diagnosed with stage-4…

Life During Wartime #24: AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw An American Werewolf in London (1981) U.S.: Prime, Fubo, AMC, DirecTV, Shudder, Sling Canada: Hollywood Suite My daughter is 17 and my son is 15, and it was time--past time, if you ask me--for them to see John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. I didn't provide much preamble for the presentation, just that it was one of the "big ones" of the horror genre, a classic that sits in there next to stuff like The Exorcist, Halloween, Psycho, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Jaws, The Thing (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street, and, for me, The…

Life During Wartime #23: THE MUPPET MOVIE (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw The Muppet Movie (1979) U.S./Canada: Disney+ We started quarantine with the best-laid plans and nine months later--the duration of human gestation--find ourselves not somewhere we intended or could have predicted. We had a regular game night, but adding tension to tension proved unwise; we were ready for a couple of months of this, but as it became clear that no help was on the way, I was forced to take a job in the "essential" sector of our nightmare. The toll on my mental health has been extreme--lapping over into home, where I barely had the energy…

Life During Wartime #21: NEAR DARK (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Near Dark (1987) U.S. & Canada: rental only I got a graduation notice in the mail the other day from the daughter of close friends. I looked at it for a long time. The young woman finishing high school in this, the strangest of years, had, a couple of years ago, tried to kill herself and wound up getting institutionalized for a brief period. It was during this time that her mother reached out to me--knowing my history of mental illness--and asked if I could maybe write her daughter a letter. Nothing specific, just, you know...maybe I could.…

Life During Wartime #22: THE THING (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw The Thing (1982) U.S.: Starz, DirecTV Canada: Crave Starz The rule my wife and I have for our kids about what they can watch is that there are really no restrictions, but the price is they need to have a conversation with us about content before and after. They'll have all the information they could possibly want going in, and then they can make their own decisions as to whether or not they still want to see it. We've taught them there are things they can see in a film that they can never un-see. We're also…

Life During Wartime #20: THE BIRDS (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw The Birds (1963) U.S.: DirecTV Canada: Crave Starz With a strong foundation in classic Hitchcock and growing up surrounded by Hitchcock paraphernalia, my kids are, somewhat by osmosis, already fans. I didn't bother with a lot of background, in other words, before The Birds. What I did say was that Vertigo was Hitchcock confessing his most secret self, only to have it popularly rejected. How does it make you feel when you say something important to you, that's hard for you to say, only to have the person you're telling it to minimize or dismiss it? The…

Life During Wartime #19: ROMAN HOLIDAY (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Roman Holiday (1953) U.S.: Prime, FlixFling Canada: FlixFling William Wyler is a titan. He had a twenty-some year run of hits, among them films like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and Wuthering Heights (1939). My daughter loves the Brontë novel and asked who starred in Wyler's. (We're both avowed fans of Andrea Arnold's version.) I said, "Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier." "Does that one end at the halfway point?" "It does." It's good, though. Before the Arnold version, I'd say it was the best one in an admittedly weak field. My son wanted to…

Life During Wartime #18: THE WICKER MAN (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw The Wicker Man (1973) U.S.: Netflix Canada: rental only If it seems like we talk about religion a lot as a family, well, I guess we do. Not organized religion, per se, but belief, spirituality, and most of all morality. My kids need to be curious. Curiosity is a requirement. And if you're curious enough and ask "why" enough, you eventually get to the ultimate questions. Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man would play beautifully in a double feature with Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer, as both are movies about the intersection of fundamentalist Christianity with the pagan religions it's absorbed, supplanted,…

Life During Wartime #17: SHAUN OF THE DEAD (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Shaun of the Dead (2004) U.S.: DirecTV, Starz Canada: Netflix Zombie movies are complicated, and that complication is itself complicated. Is there something intrinsically metaphorical about cannibalism? Catholics would say so--or, rather, they wouldn't. The ingesting of the Host, after all, isn't a metaphor. For the rest of us, though, the ingestion of another carries with it an innate taboo: the essence of society is threatened when one member of a group is consuming another. There's a sense of "dirtiness" that translates, I think, into zombie mythology as a form of contagion that can be passed through…

Life During Wartime #16: OUTRAGE (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Outrage (1950) U.S. & Canada: YouTube Ida Lupino was tough, smart, resilient, and talented. The inheritor of a centuries-old legacy of stage performers, she was only reluctantly an actress and nominal star before parlaying her reputation into a career behind the camera as producer and director. During Hollywood's so-called "Golden Age," she was something of a unicorn for the power she held as a woman in an industry dominated, then as now, by men. As an actress, her big break after years of playing some variation of prostitute/bad girl with a heart of gold came in Raoul…

Life During Wartime #15: DO THE RIGHT THING (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Do the Right Thing (1989) U.S.: Starz Amazon Canada: Crave Starz I introduced Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing to my kids as the defining film of arguably the most important American director of the past forty years, Spike Lee. I've had a strange relationship with Lee's films, one I compared to my kids to my relationship with Neil Young. I didn't always understand Neil Young's music as a kid or, even, in truth as a younger man who should've known better--but in the last twenty years or so, his genius has become inescapable for me. In…

Life During Wartime #14: UN CHIEN ANDALOU (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Un chien andalou (1929) U.S.: IndieFlix, Flix Fling Canada: Flix Fling My kids were raised on The Pixies and for as long as they can remember, I've mentioned that the words to "Debaser," in which lead singer Frank Black screams that he's "Un chien andalousia," is a reference to a great surrealist film I would show them one day. Today was that day. The quick way to explain "surrealism" to the only moderately-interested is to ask them to imagine introducing something strange into the middle of something completely ordinary. Dreams operate on principles of surrealism: you could…

Life During Wartime #13: THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN + LA CIGARETTE (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) U.S. & Canada: YouTube La cigarette (The Cigarette) (1919) U.S. & Canada: YouTube Germaine Dulac was a filmmaker (and a great one), but that may be the least of what she was. A theorist, photographer, journalist, and critic, her interests were varied, canted towards the experimental and the surreal. As a film programmer, she was elected president of the Federation de cine-clubs and presided over the introduction of at least one certifiable genius, Jean Vigo. Her masterwork, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), came out the year prior to Luis Buñuel's…

Life During Wartime #12: FARGO (Patreon exclusive)

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by Walter Chaw Fargo (1996) U.S.: Starz, DirecTV Canada: rental only My kids have a great deal of experience with the Coen Brothers. Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, True Grit, Hail, Caesar!--all seen by both children. My daughter, the more adventurous moviegoer of the two, has also seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and No Country for Old Men, which she declared to be the most frightening movie she'd ever watched. This is coming from a veteran of The Exorcist, Poltergeist,…