Café Society (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2016, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Cafesociety1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can’t seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015’s Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen’s nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker’s aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen’s old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren’t the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully lensed and defiantly dumb, it’s another testament to Allen’s surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

TIFF ’16: The Bad Batch; Colossal; Jackie

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Chile, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Sci-Fi, Spain, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff16badbatch

THE BAD BATCH
**½/****
starring Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

COLOSSAL
**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

JACKIE
***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Bill Chambers Three very different #TIFF16 films–a postapocalyptic cannibal western (The Bad Batch), a modestly-scaled kaiju eiga (Colossal), and a period docudrama (Jackie)–form a trilogy in my mind thematically linked by crestfallen female protagonists who discover reserves of strength in dire situations. The Bad Batch is the only one of these movies directed by a woman, though, and dare I say you can tell, not only in how the camera softly caresses Jason Momoa’s Olympian contours, but also in the way the framing and blocking of the heroine imply the constant peril of being a woman. Working through the neophyte filmmaker’s genre playbook, director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with this dystopian flick most reminiscent of the Australian strain in terms of vibe/aesthetics, what with its shantytown sets, symbolic names, and obligatory feral child. (The only thing missing is a car fetish.) Winsome Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to the other side of some Trumpian fence in Texas with only the clothes on her back and a tattoo that identifies her as an undesirable (or bad batch). Almost immediately she’s dragged away to a cannibal camp, where they chop off her right arm. Missing a leg, too, by the time she escapes, she finds refuge–and prosthetic limbs–in the village of Comfort, whose denizens mostly give her space. Time and body-image issues stoke her desire for revenge, however, putting her on a collision course with Momoa’s Miami Man, a brilliant sketch artist who’s also a fearsome, unsympathetic consumer of human flesh.

Fantastic Fest ’16: The Handmaiden

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Romance, South Korea

Ff16handmaiden

Ah-ga-ssi
****/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Moon So-ri
screenplay by Chung Seo-Kyung, Park Chan-wook, based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
directed by Park Chan-wook

by Walter Chaw I love Stoker, Korean master Park Chan-wook’s updating of Shadow of a Doubt that centres on “young Charlie’s” sexual awakening and all the perverse tensions attending that moment in a brittle upper-middle-class Nashville. Married to the swooning, hypnotic camerawork that has been the hallmark of Park’s collaboration with DP Chung Chung since Oldboy, it has about it the perversity of a Victorian chamber drama squeezed through the filter of a very Korean take on class and sex–attitudes partly shaped by living in the shadow of one of the two or three most unstable regimes in the world. Stoker is a haunted-house movie without ghosts; a vampire movie without vampires. Its hero is a young woman who dons the raiment of the patriarchy at the end, lets blood on a field of flowers (one of a series of literal and metaphorical deflowerings), and stalks into the world fully-formed and dangerous. Park is best known for his “Vengeance Trilogy,” of course, but it’s the last film of that cycle, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, that finds itself faced with the kind of moral dilemma that has marked Park’s work since. It’s arguable that before it, Park was an exploitation filmmaker. A conversant, brilliant exploitation filmmaker, but an exploitation filmmaker just the same. Lady Vengeance, however, deals with the ethics of violence and the toll of retribution on the avengers. It’s smart as hell, beautiful to look at, nigh unwatchable. I mean that as praise, for it should be.

TIFF ’16: Carrie Pilby

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
*/****directed by Susan Johnson by Bill Chambers True story: Carrie, dining alone, catches eyes with a handsome stranger across the restaurant. He confidently strides up to her table and she starts rambling on about how she's flattered but not interested, after which I said, in perfect unison with the handsome stranger on screen, "I was just going to ask if I could borrow your chair." Am I psychic? No, I'm just fluent in Sitcom. Incidentally, this cheap bit of embarrassment humour scored laughs instead of groans at my screening, which suggests that a generation throwing TV away has blinded them…

Telluride ’16: La La Land

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2016

Tell16lalaland

*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Finn Wittrock, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is sort of like Down with Love and also sort of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, derivative in the way that things are derivative when they have no real knowledge of or even maybe affection for the things from which they ostensibly derive. At the least, the picture demonstrates no real knowledge of the Hollywood musical. It’s homage in the same way that “Stranger Things” is homage. It’s beard oil, suspenders, and craft beer: The Movie. It’s homage the way that putting a tutu on a dog pays homage to ballet. When something is this familiar, its set-pieces need to be extraordinary. Howard Hawks understood this. Vincente Minnelli, of course. Stanley Donen? Stop yourself. Yes. When Chazelle does the two or three blow-out sequences meant to dazzle, all they do is seem psychotic. The best thing about his Whiplash is arguably its editing. (It won the Oscar.) Now imagine Brigadoon cut like that. Consider the scene in La La Land that ends in a swimming pool, camera spinning deliriously around in a circle like something drowning or getting death-rolled by an alligator. It’s intended to be ebullient; it feels panicky and hallucinogenic. It feels like that scene in Seconds where Rock Hudson joins a bacchanal in a grape-stomping vat. Seconds wasn’t a good musical, either.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Romance, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Buckaroo2

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Bonzai
***/****
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch
directed by W.D. Richter

by Walter Chaw It isn’t so much that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (henceforth Adventures) is hard to follow, it’s that it’s hard to assimilate. Once you’re drawn into the deadly serious heart askew of W.D. Richter’s film, its Gordian plot begins to unravel, its tangled web unweaves, and it becomes clear that the most disturbing thing about this legendarily convoluted camp masterpiece is that it makes perfect sense. That moment of clarity occurs somewhere in the middle of the fourth viewing, and while I can’t necessarily guarantee that the trial is worth it for everyone, it was for me. Adventures reveals itself as a commentary on racism, an exploration of Communism in the Reagan era, a surprisingly influential genre piece, and a sly statement on early-Eighties excess and malaise. What I’m trying to say is that the film is holding my brain hostage, and I would like it back.

The River (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, India, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK

Theriver1

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Suprova Mukerjee
screenplay by Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir, based on the book by Godden
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw There’s something ineffable about Jean Renoir’s same-named adaptation of Rumer Godden’s The River. It has to do with how the light is different in our memories of childhood, the good days and especially the bad, captured here in three-strip Technicolor that understands at last Impressionism as a birthright of film. It’s more real than real ever was, the “real” of nostalgia and melancholy and Romanticism. It’s not possible to see in any other visual medium, though I confess I’ve seen it in certain poetry by certain poets. But there are moments–like in the films of Powell & Pressburger, who did their own Rumer Godden adaptation, the socio-sexual horror flick Black Narcissus–where you can definitely see it in cinema. The past, I mean. Not as it was, but as you remember it. The River captures the fear and longing of lazy summers on the cusp, of passing from innocence over to experience, of remembering things you never experienced so that you know you’re connected to the entire stream of lives you’ve lived and lives you haven’t, or haven’t yet. I don’t know how The River does it, but it does.

Equals (2016)

Equals (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi

*/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart, Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Drake Doremus

by Walter Chaw Drake Doremus’s Equals is Gattaca and Equilibrium and THX 1138 and Code 46 and Michael Radford’s great 1984, all mashed up into an easy-to-conceptualize and even easier to swallow twenty-something romance that posits simply that love conquers all. It’s inoffensive at all times, is only “science-fiction” because there’s a blue filter on the lens, and offers so little that is its own that it’s easy to miss an exceptional cast doing exceptional work. Equals is another prize example of one of those movies that people will struggle to remember (like Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go–just like, in fact) or come upon some time later on down the line only to remark how such-and-such is a big star now and how you never knew so-and-so was in this and, hey, how is it they got so many amazing folks in such a blah picture; did it even get a release?

In a Lonely Place (1950) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Inalonelyplace5

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
screenplay by Andrew Solt, adaptation by Edmund H. North, based upon a story by Dorothy B. Hughes
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Walter Chaw In another time and place, they would’ve called Gloria Grahame “one sick twist,” and the brand would’ve stuck. There are stories, a few of them true. There’s the one about her stepson, and the thing where she keeps getting plastic surgery until her face is paralyzed, which was the alleged goal after Grahame became morbidly devoted to Kuleshov’s editing theories. There’s the weird book an ex-lover wrote about her last days, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and indeed, her story has been told largely through the men who wanted her, the men who had her, and the men who ruined her. In many ways, she’s the quintessential femme fatale of the noir era, not just for the roles she took, but because the roles she took reflected the traps she was in. She’s the patron saint of the way we treat women first as objects of desire, then as objects of disgust. Her late moment as the girl who “cain’t” say no encapsulates the perversity of Rodgers & Hammerstein, sure, and the sad decline of a woman who confessed at the end of her life that she never quite figured out Hollywood–though it sure looks like Hollywood had her figured. She is one of the great tragic figures of the age, both microcosm and avatar of that wonderland of image-fixers and dream-crushers. For my money, the film that best captures Grahame in her complexity, in all her multifoliate relationships with the world and her millions of voyeurs, is Nicholas Ray’s scabrous In A Lonely Place. It’s a masculine confession and an apology. It’s hollow. Aren’t they all?

No Way Out (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Espionage, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Nowayout1Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex… Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible–enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson’s largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his star-making turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner’s stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn’t mind because Costner isn’t really all that threatening. He sure is likable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he, in fact, discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor–now we got issues.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, Zombie

Swissarmyman

***½/****
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels’ Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatological comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren’t any, save the rapid decomposition that’s causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny’s farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it’s not clear that this is “actually” happening or just a fantasy of Hank’s before dying. By the middle of the picture, it’s apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it’s possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that’s all it is.

Anomalisa (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 2015, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

Anomalisa1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson

by Walter Chaw Writing about a Charlie Kaufman film, if you do it honestly, is writing about yourself. I’ve said before, and it helps me to repeat it, that I don’t really understand Kaufman’s films, but that they do understand me. Kaufman is the most important, innovative voice in American cinema since Orson Welles, and though he has enjoyed more autonomy in expressing that voice than Welles, I would argue that the seven years separating his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and this follow-up, a stop-motion collaboration with Duke Johnson called Anomalisa, suggest that it’s not as easy as it should be. Certainly, the journey that Anomalisa has taken is far from conventional, from Kaufman play written under the pseudonym “Francis Fregosi,” through a Kickstarter campaign, through the general challenge of making an adult-themed animation in a country that sees animation as a genre not a medium, to now this tour of festivals, looking for distribution. The play was introduced as part of a Carter Burwell project titled “Theater of the New Ear”. It was a late replacement on a Kaufman/Coen Bros. double-bill when the Coens “dropped out” at the eleventh hour, and this unknown Fregosi’s piece took its place.

Love & Friendship (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

Lovefriendship

***½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenweil, Chloë Sevigny
based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen
written & directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda When Whit Stillman emerged from his thirteen-year sojourn in the wilderness after The Last Days of Disco, it was with the pastel-washed curio Damsels in Distress, practically a radio transmission from a planet of the auteur’s own construction. Where his Metropolitan and Barcelona dropped anchor in immaculately-observed social environs (Manhattan’s waning debutante scene and the European refuge of loquacious Americans, respectively), Stillman’s modestly-budgeted return to filmmaking holed up in a dreamlike and not especially convincing college setting, where Gatsby-esque self-inventors sought to transform their ugly little world through good soap and new dance crazes. A deeply hermetic work even by Stillman’s standards, Damsels in Distress feels in retrospect like a minor but necessary stepping stone back to the better realized but still heightened reality of Love & Friendship, a signature work that is nevertheless Stillman’s most accessible to the uninitiated. Despite marking his first adaptation–of Lady Susan, a short, posthumously-published epistolary novel by Jane Austen, whom he has long worshipped–the film is as pure an expression of the Stillman style and worldview as any despite its largely English cast and the sincerity of its period trappings as a 1790s costume comedy about the machinations of the rich, the formerly rich, and the rich-adjacent.

Knight of Cups (2016)

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

Knightofcups

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Wes Bentley
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is an obvious companion piece to Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and Fellini’s 8½, and a less obvious spiritual companion to the Coens’ Hail Caesar!, Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, and even Fosse’s All That Jazz. Its most direct influence is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, with Malick borrowing phrases entire from its text along with its sense of wandering, seeking, and the pilgrim meeting various incarnations of sin and redemption on the road to salvation. Malick, as has become his hallmark, places people against images of eternity. In Los Angeles, the only external nature he can find is the ocean, and so he sends his “Christian” (Bale), playing a film director named “Rick,” to the shore repeatedly with a succession of women who are incarnations of Bunyan’s “Evangelical” and “Faithful” and “Mercy,” including his wife (Cate Blanchett), whom he rejects and, if Malick follows form, who will be the centre of another story all her own. Rick wanders through streets, studio lots, highrise suites that are Bunyan’s City of Destruction and Vanity Fair and, in a sequence where one guide (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant with either Rick’s child or her husband’s, Slough of Despond, before finally discovering peace of sorts alone in the Delectable Mountains of Joshua Tree.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Colonelblimp3

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey, Roland Culver
written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw The prototype in many ways for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, although lighthearted and easily mistaken for a romp, is an existential horror film that, for all the things it’s otherwise about, is most vitally about what it’s like to grow old. There’s a moment early on–when our hero, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), realizes he’s let the love of his life marry his best friend–that clarifies exactly what the picture has on its mind. For the rest of the film, as the kingdom of his memories grows to a size that dwarfs modernity rushing past, Candy finds shades of the lost Edith (Deborah Kerr), his personal Lenore, resurfacing in the faces of young women the world over. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp understands that as one grows old, an entire village sprouts in the mind, full of beloved businesses and places that have long since disappeared, peopled by old flames and loved ones, dead or just vanished, but in any case never again to resume the form in which memory has frozen them. Though memorable for its technical brilliance, its Technicolor vibrancy, and its courageously sprung narrative structure, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘s ability to pinion the sadness, the loneliness, that experience carries with it is what makes the movie what it is. Life as a process of emotional attrition: Last man standing is cold comfort, indeed.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) [The Signature Collection] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 1930s, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Romance

Snowwhite1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
story adaptation Ted Sears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Dick Richard, Earl Hurd, Merrill De Maris, Dorothy Ann Blank, Webb Smith
supervising director David Hand

by Bill Chambers Walt Disney was shooting for the moon with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, not just his first but the first animated feature. He of the Silly Symphony wanted it to have prestige, fostering an obsessive-compulsive streak within the studio that is curiously reflected in the film’s epic preoccupation with orderliness, cleanliness, and labour. It has the air of manifesto when one considers that of the eight songs on the soundtrack, two, “Whistle While You Work” and “Heigh-ho,” are about the satisfaction of work1 while a third, “Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum,” is a set of bathing instructions subtitled “The Dwarfs’ Washing Song.” In her unrelenting fastidiousness, Snow White reeks of self-portraiture (armchair Freuds might speculate on Snow White’s other qualities, such as her being so perfect as to drive the competition mad, as they apply to Disney, already an Ozymandian figure armed with multiple Academy awards by the time of production), and it’s because of this that her predilection for housework doesn’t feel like the typical chauvinism abundant in the Disney canon. When she scolds two squirrels for sweeping dirt under the carpet, it’s difficult not to hear it as an ethos.

Code Unknown (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2016, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Romance, Romania, The Criterion Collection

Codeunknown1

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Sepp Bierbichler, Ona Lu Yenke
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer In the vignette that opens Code Unknown, a young girl in pigtails, maybe 9 or 10 years old, cowers against a plain wall, trembling before director Michael Haneke’s static camera. If you know Haneke’s work–his previous film at the time, Funny Games, had depicted the torture and murder of a bourgeois French mom and dad plus their fair-haired moppet–the image is more than a little disturbing. But Haneke immediately pulls the rug out. Rather than cry, the girl suddenly stands and smiles, looking expectantly towards the camera. Haneke then cuts to reverse angles on different children, in close-up, also looking towards the camera. The girl has an audience, and so we understand that she was giving a performance. In this case, it’s a game of charades among deaf children, with the spectators attempting to guess, using sign language, what the girl was trying to convey. “Alone?” one girl signs. The girl in pigtails shakes her head. Another signs, “Hiding place?” No. Nor is she trying to convey “guilty conscience,” “gangster,” “sad,” or even “locked up.” In the face of so many impassive classmates, the girl in pigtails finally looks weary and maybe on the verge of tears for real. With that, the screen goes black, and the title appears: Code Unknown.

Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut (1990) [Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack] + Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions (1995) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in1990s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Nightbreed1

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg, Charles Haid
screenplay by Clive Barker, based on his novel Cabal
directed by Clive Barker

CLIVE BARKER’S LORD OF ILLUSIONS
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Scott Bakula, Kevin J. O’Connor, Famke Janssen, Daniel Von Bargen
written for the screen and directed by Clive Barker

by Walter Chaw Clive Barker’s too-brief directing career, capping his time as the Stephen King-anointed prince of horror (“I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker,” went King’s famous endorsement), produced three cult classics: Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions. His Hollywood trajectory traces the familiar tale of enfant terrible allowed full reign on his first project, only to find subsequent efforts bowdlerized by non-believers. Director’s cuts of Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions have circulated in some form over the years, with fans claiming–particularly in the case of Nightbreed–that masterpieces had been corrupted, hidden from sight. It’s the kind of intrigue that forms the basis of much of Barker’s work: the hidden grotto, arcane knowledge secreted away, art too beautiful for human eyes. There’s something of the fury of H.P. Lovecraft’s cult of personality in this–something more of the cosplay phenomenon. Each of Barker’s movies evokes the absolute acceptance that outsiders encounter at genre conventions: they are explosions of the internal, actings-out of repressed desires. Find in this explanation of the coda, surprisingly sticky despite the bad pun, to his short-story anthologies: “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.” Clive Barker is the Douglas Sirk of splatter.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Short Films

Posted in****/****, 2015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Short Films, Sweden, ZERO STARS

Fanfest15babysitter

by Walter Chaw

The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera–the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise–a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum–is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.

Crimson Peak (2015)

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

Crimsonpeak

*/****
starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Jim Beaver
written by Guillermo del Toro & Matthew Robbins
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I love Guillermo del Toro. I love the ethic driving Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone and the Frankenstein and Pinocchio myths driving Mimic. I love the Prodigal Son of Blade II, the ferocity, of course, and vision of Pan’s Labyrinth, and all of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, my favourite of his films; every frame is wonder. I didn’t like Pacific Rim but I did think it was at least all-in and there’s something to be said for that. And now here’s Crimson Peak, which is just, you know, really bad and for no one. I have a friend who referred to del Toro’s book version of The Strain (I’ve never read it) as arrogant. I didn’t understand that, but it tickled during Pacific Rim and has found full flower now in Crimson Peak. There’s a point at which someone who is an expert in something can go from teacher to pedant. What begins as a conversation, nurturing and full of joy, becomes patronizing and solipsistic. I myself probably crossed over years ago. Now I have company. Del Toro at his best shares what he loves. At his worst (and Crimson Peak is del Toro at his worst, by a long shot), he believes that he’s talking over your head. You couldn’t possibly understand. You’ll never catch all his references, he says. And suddenly the party’s over and he’s all by himself in his self-aggrandizing echo chamber of curiosities.