Streaming Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Spaceman (2024) + Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)

March 15, 20242024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Streaming

SPACEMAN
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Colby Day, based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
directed by Johan Renck

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING
**/****
starring Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia DeBonis
written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead
directed by Rachel Lambert

by Walter Chaw Its basic set-up is like Duncan Jones’s Moon: a lone astronaut, far from home and tethered only by occasional contact with the partner he’s left behind on Earth, finds some solace in conversations with an alien/artificial intelligence. But this genre of listless Rocket Men and their internal melodramas traces back to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, right? Or that 1964 episode of the original “Twilight Zone”, “The Long Morrow”? Apocalypse-tinged futureworlds centred around Byronic heroes. Where its antecedents rarely showed the strain of their creation, however, Johan Renck’s Spaceman (an adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia) often does. It has good taste, and maybe even the right idea in putting a man in isolation in order to Altered States him into a cleaner understanding of his essential self, but it’s better at pounding out the notes than it is at hearing the music. While I didn’t hate it, I am, I suspect, squarely in its target audience of pretentious, sad, The Fountain-loving Proust-readers, so it never drowned me like I hoped it would. Me, whose pockets are always filled with the smooth rocks I picked along the shore.

Afire (2023)

December 18, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Streaming

***½/****
starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Walter Chaw In their fetishization of hopelessly pretty women on bicycles. there is a hint of Claude Chabrol in Christian Petzold’s films; and in their obsessive deconstructions of interpersonal interactions, a touch of Arnaud Desplechin. Both echoes are filtered through a specifically Teutonic social brusqueness that reminds me now of Paul Verhoeven’s early Dutch thrillers. Petzold’s latest, Afire, is, in other words, a wonderland for film nerds looking to engage in another of this filmmaker’s beautifully wrought bits of cinematic nostalgia, though I confess Afire flayed me close to the bone more for its depiction of a lumpen, lachrymose writer named Leon (Thomas Schubert) than for its rich, multi-textural references. (It’s Ozon that Petzold most resembles, isn’t it? Or is it countryman Fassbinder, the master of the social-realist melodrama?) The picture opens with Leon and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) driving to Felix’s father’s house in the woods by the ocean when their car breaks down. Wandering along a trail, Leon asks if they’re lost, and Felix, in response, sprints deeper into the forest with promises to scout out the road ahead. “It can’t be far!” he says. Afire sets itself up immediately to be a folk-horror movie where Felix never comes back and Leon is left to fend for himself against cultists or witches or wildlife. But Felix does come back, and all those immediate feelings of dread linger like a chill over the remainder that no amount of the film’s wildfires can completely chase away.

May December (2023)

November 17, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
screenplay by Samy Burch
directed by Todd Haynes

by Angelo Muredda “You just don’t know with these Hollywood types,” Julianne Moore’s wilted Southern belle Gracie says early in Todd Haynes’s intricate hothouse melodrama, May December. She’s referring, by way of a throwaway reference to a prior encounter with Judge Judy, to the impending visit at her idyllic Savannah, Georgia home by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV actress who’s about to play her in a movie about the defining event of her life more than twenty years prior. Gracie is a tabloid celebrity, famous for her exploitative sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy, for which she served time in prison. Improbably, she’s also a proud matriarch, having married and built a home with her victim, Joe (Charles Melton), who now finds himself an empty nester at the ripe age of 36, as the couple’s twin children, born while she was in prison, prepare to go off to college. Loosely inspired by the story of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau, who went on to marry and start a family with the victim of her abuse until their separation in 2019, May December isn’t a work of true crime so much as a playful, sly, tonally restless exploration of Gracie’s observation about the unknowability of Hollywood folks, which turns out to be broadly applicable to the unfathomable nature of everyone, including herself and her partner.

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

May 20, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Romance, Streaming, Thriller, ZERO STARS

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.

Air (2023)

May 16, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Streaming

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis
written by Alex Convery
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw The irony of a film celebrating the taking of chances being so absolutely afraid to take any chances is so conspicuous it feels a little like bullying to point it out, but here goes: Ben Affleck’s Air is the flabby, out-of-shape version of Moneyball, aspiring only to appease the narcissists it essays and the billion-dollar corporations with which they have developed disturbing symbiotic relationships. It’s not boring, exactly, though it is like that story your grandfather has told you a dozen times already: you listen patiently for the climax you know is coming in order to time your surprise and delight appropriately. Some movies in this vein, like Miracle, are pretty good. Others, like Hoosiers, are pretty awful. All of them are watchable pabulum, pre-chewed and partially digested. It goes down without much swallowing and goes out without much noise–and every six months, there’s another one. Interviews with Affleck and his muse Matt Damon have found them breathlessly recounting how scripter Alex Convery was watching an ESPN “30 on 30” documentary when he had the “eureka” that the story of Nike guy Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) would “make a great movie!” An uncredited rewrite by Affleck/Damon incorporated notes from roundball legend Michael Jordan hissownself, elevating the roles his mother, Deloris (Viola Davis, whom Jordan cast), and Olympics coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) played in Jordan’s decision to sign a sponsorship deal with Nike. Et voilà! Not a “great movie,” let’s say, but definitely a movie.

Somebody I Used to Know (2023)

February 9, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey Clemons, Julie Hagerty
written by Dave Franco & Alison Brie
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw My Best Friend’s Wedding is vile, happy-go-fucky bullshit that polishes the sociopathic behaviour of a solipsistic narcissist to a patently plastic Julia Roberts sheen. It stinks of flop sweat and forced artificiality, and it made somewhere in the neighbourhood of a kabillion dollars because it traffics in exactly the sort of soft-racist, misogynistic horsepucky favoured by a demographic that likes blended drinks and doing mall walks. About 30 minutes into Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know, someone confronts someone else by saying, “You’re not doing some My Best Friend’s Wedding thing, are you?” And, well, she is. Credit for knowing just how unbearable your film is, I guess, this comedy of cringe where “naturalism” means ending every statement as a question and the main character is a pastiche of insufferable tropes who decorated her childhood room with a Sleater-Kinney poster, a pen-drawing of Joni Mitchell, and the “Have a Nice Daze” Dazed and Confused and American Movie teaser posters. Get it? That real clear picture of who this person is and who the people sketching her are? The song over the closing credits is Third-Eye Blind‘s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Got it now? There’s a Chance the Rapper sighting, too. Run. Fucking save yourself.

Shotgun Wedding (2023) + You People (2023)

January 31, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming

SHOTGUN WEDDING
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz
written by Mark Hammer
directed by Jason Moore

YOU PEOPLE
***/****
starring Jonah Hill, Lauren London, David Duchovny, Eddie Murphy
written by Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris
directed by Kenya Barris

by Walter Chaw Jennifer Coolidge, 61, plays the mother of 50-year-old Josh Duhamel in Jason “Pitch Perfect” Moore’s abominable-in-pretty-much-every-conceivable-way Shotgun Wedding, and her being 11 when she had him isn’t even the worst of it. Honestly, this is the kind of movie where it would’ve been funny if they’d made a joke out of that somehow (like maybe how Steve Coulter, who plays his dad, would’ve been 12), and Coolidge has exactly the befuddled, oversexed MILF persona to pull it off. I don’t know, I didn’t write this shit. Coolidge is Carol and Coulter is Larry. Their son Tom is a total loser recently released from a minor-league baseball team, which only makes sense because he’s on the AARP mailing list. Has he been trying to make it to “the show” for 30 years? One of these Crash Davis things, I guess. Just kidding: Crash was 33; can Tom even tie his own shoes anymore without getting winded? Because I’m turning 50 this year, and let me tell you, I cannot. Tom is marrying Darcy (Jennifer Lopez), who spends every other sentence mobbing Tom for each of his groomzilla decisions–decisions he has to make, because Darcy is disengaged from the entire process and resents having to have a wedding at all, since one of the first things she said to him when they started dating was that she didn’t want a fancy wedding. Tom will eventually apologize for not listening to her, but if the intent is to make this about Tom learning to be a better partner, I must confess I would stop listening to someone as passive-aggressive and monstrously belittling as Darcy. Maybe Tom has a humiliation kink. That would explain why he played minor-league baseball for 30 years and probably votes Republican. It’s not my place to judge that, I’m just observing it.

White Noise (2022)

December 29, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, UK

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda “Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip,” says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo’s satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo’s protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store’s capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that’s hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called “airborne toxic event” that’s blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store’s unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo’s novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

Halloween Ends (2022)

October 14, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural–and, in most cases, monotextual–training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you’ve painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter’s Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller’s glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it’s either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it’s instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

The Munsters (2022) – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Horror, Streaming

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It’s the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes’s “muse,” though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn’t get to on their own. I can’t claim Zombie’s for everyone–hell, Cassavetes ain’t for everyone, either–but he works on a specific wavelength where if you’re hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn’t get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil’s Rejects on, I’ve been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of “The Munsters” (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories–I was excited. I wish it were better.

Telluride ’22: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

September 4, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Streaming, Telluride

Bardo
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
½*/****
starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Hugo Albores, Andrés Almeida, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
written by Nicolás Giacobone & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how tempting it is to just re-post my review of Birdman for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo with a neon “BUT MORE SO” flashing over it, given that I’ve already invested a full three hours in the Mexican auteur’s latest altar to unseemly false modesty. (Oscars four and five, here we come.) This one is another technically dazzling cri de cœur featuring a tortured artist caught in the vicissitudes of a midlife crisis. The stand-in for Iñárritu is Mexican investigative journalist Silverio (a wonderful Daniel Giménez Cacho), who returns to Mexico for the first time in years on the eve of his winning a prestigious award from an American institution. This leads to the usual mid-life stuff: a visit with a dead father and a dying mother; a raucous party where his old friends give him shit for exploiting Mexicans and Mexican culture for gringo fame, power, and approval; a magic-realist consideration of a still-born child, resulting in a repulsive gag played like a circus trick in which a newborn is shoved back into the womb; and the exploration of impostor syndrome, which feels increasingly disingenuous with every enormous set-piece ripped off the Film School Mount Olympus. Bardo is Jay Sherman’s 8½, and knowing it doesn’t excuse it.

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

August 19, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

*½/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Julia Stiles
screenplay by David Coggeshall
directed by William Brent Bell

by Angelo Muredda “Esther’s terrifying saga continues,” promises the confusing promotional copy for William Brent Bell’s Orphan: First Kill, a listless prequel to Jaume Collet-Serra’s impressively nasty thriller Orphan. It says something about the project’s existential inertia that even the pitch is muddled about whether the film’s diminutive protagonist, played again with an appropriate mix of madame prudishness and girlish optimism by Isabelle Fuhrman, is coming or going. Arriving a whole 13-year-old’s lifespan after the original, which famously culminated in the reveal that Esther was not a helpless urchin from St. Mariana’s Home for Girls but a short, thirty-something serial killer from Estonia, Orphan: First Kill dilutes rather than develops the deliberately thin mythos of its predecessor, stretching its punchy 30-second exposition dump about her past into 100 minutes of deadweight.

Prey (2022)

August 4, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp
screenplay by Patrick Aison
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw There is a complete lack of pretense to Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey–lack of pretense being one of the emerging traits of a filmmaker whose two films so far (both stealth sequels, both tremendously ethical towards their source materials) are lean genre exercises that feel like minor miracles in a landscape studded with sodden, high-profile disasters. Neither a puzzlebox nor a legacy sequel requiring a spreadsheet and an encyclopedic knowledge of a quarter-century of lore, Prey tells a particular, standalone story in an economical way. It’s a coming-of-age period piece with shades of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto; what I’m saying is it means business. Set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, it follows a spirited young Comanche woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder), as she tries to prove herself as a hunter under the shadow of her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a gifted bowman and all-around badass who has a stranglehold on the admiration of their tribe. When she follows an all-male hunting party in search of the mountain lion that has attacked one of their people, one of the young men asks her why she’s bothered, given that they don’t need a cook out there in the wilderness. But she sees things they miss in their arrogance and desire to impress one another. Like the skinned rattlesnake left by a path, or the footprint bigger than anything that should be in this place. The boys discount the latter as nothing to worry about, lest they be seen as cautious and thoughtful–as feminine, like Naru.

All the Old Knives (2022)

April 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz

by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays “Barley” Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn’t fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides–well, all three sides–against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It’s the best film Schepisi’s made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love’s continued to bloom. They’ve heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I’ve loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It’s one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.

Deep Water (2022)

March 17, 2022****/****, 2022, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Ana De Armas, Tracy Letts, Grace Jenkins
screenplay by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, based upon the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Walter Chaw Patricia Highsmith’s closest analogue in film for me is David Cronenberg–insect anthropologists, both, who see human beings in terms of their emotionless, biomechanical tics and repetitions. Her books are insidious things, death by quicksand or, like the protagonist of her short story “The Snail-Watcher,” drowned beneath a sea of the snails he keeps and breeds as objects of…well, it’s more than fascination. The hero of Highsmith’s Deep Water, Vic Van Allen, keeps snails, too. He names them, studies them, escapes to them when he can’t bear the company of his licentious wife, Melinda. He finds profundity in their couplings and multiplications as well as tragedy in their deaths, and he sees in them a corollary to his relationship with a wife he despises and a child he adores. Vic Van Allen can be understood entirely as an insect in a man’s clothing. He is slow, inexorable where Melinda is quicksilver, flighty, and resentful of their life together, seeking comfort and an escape of her own in a parade of lovers. At the root of it all, Highsmith is about forms of escape: the bomb shelters to which we retreat when stimulated, prodded, provoked like snails back into our shells.

Turning Red (2022)

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

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

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

The Seed (2022) – Shudder

March 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

**½/****
starring Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge, Sophie Vavasseur
written and directed by Sam Walker

by Walter Chaw A spirited if familiar body-horror comedy, Sam Walker’s hyphenate debut The Seed showcases a sharp, clean writing/directing aesthetic that doesn’t do anything particularly novel but does the old stuff with verve and economy. Here, a trio of pals decamps to a mod-mansion in the middle of nowhere to watch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower. At least, that’s why “geek-hot” Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) is there. Her influencer buddy Deidre (Lucy Martin) is on hand to livestream the weekend’s events, while yoga instructor Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) wouldn’t say no to a few new clicks for her business, either. The sunbathing, margaritas, mild eruptions of personal grievance, and almost-immediate interruption of cell service are all taken care of in the first 10 minutes. Then it’s on to the uncomfortably-close meteor shower that leads to them wondering if “it’s supposed to do that?” Probably not. Suddenly a thing falls into the pool, starts gooping, is fished out by our heroes (lest Heather’s dad “kill” her), and, of course, resolves itself to be a very stinky alien. “I think God took a shit in your pool, Heather,” observes Diedre, the mean one. The rest of the film is what happens when this divine excrement wakes up.

I’ll Find You (2022)

February 25, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Romance, Streaming

*/****
starring Adelaide Clemens, Leo Suter, Ursula Parker, Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by David S. Ward and Bozenna Intrator
directed by Martha Coolidge

by Walter Chaw Martha Coolidge’s I’ll Find You, in distribution limbo since 2019, is a lushly-filmed but dramatically inert WWII period romance about a trio of starcrossed lovers and musicians, separated by war and reunited by amour. Coolidge does her best with the material, but movies that employ flashbacks to when the characters are children exchanging doe-eyed stares are a little doomed from the start, even when they’re not also saddled with having to somehow use the Holocaust as a plot device that inconveniences our lovers for a while like a pesky ex-boyfriend or a dream job that requires a move across the country. Alain Resnais pulled it off (“it” being love in a time of war) in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Philip Kaufman similarly succeeded with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but this is deep and shark-infested water, the moral and practical perils of which I’ll Find You never fully reckons. Take the scene where hero tenor Robert (Leo Suter) searches for lost love Rachel (Adelaide Clemens) at recently-liberated Bergen-Belsen, where Robert shuffles disconsolately past a “Warning: Typhus” sign that serves as a jolting reminder of the housing of human beings like cattle in what feels essentially like a zombified but expensive Jane Austen adaptation. I’ll Find You sands all the edges off, which is fine some of the time but never okay when it comes to genocide. Coolidge is a spirited director, the driving force behind all-time classics like the thornier-than-you-remember Valley Girl and the deceptively jagged Rambling Rose, contorted here to helm what is essentially a Rob Reiner vehicle.

Hellbender (2022) – Shudder

February 24, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

****/****
starring Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams, John Adams
written and directed by Toby Poser & Zelda Adams & John Adams

by Walter Chaw Hellbender is rare and wild, alive with joy, bristling with the energy of its invention. Even though its story of a young woman coming of age and discovering her power is familiar (some would say overly so), the approach the film takes is bracingly unpredictable. I’ve never seen a movie quite like it, straddling the line between experimental and conventional while managing to be free somehow of anything like arrogance or pretension. This isn’t an affectation forced upon an audience, it’s a reflection of what appears to be a genuinely unique point of view. John Waters made movies like this; so does David Lynch. Hellbender falls somewhere between them while being beholden to neither. I haven’t felt like this very often watching anything. The creators are the Adams family: father John Adams, mother Toby Poser, and their daughters, Zelda and Lulu Adams. Between them, they split multiple duties before and behind the camera. They pulled up their roots at some point a few years ago to travel across the country from their home base in the Catskills, telling stories through shooting movies and learning the technical aspects of their craft as they went along. This is the seventh film created under their “Wonder Wheel” production banner, and it’s a work of art that’s very much like a masterpiece.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) – Netflix

February 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Streaming, Thriller

**½/****
starring Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Alice Krige
screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin
directed by David Blue Garcia

by Walter Chaw David Blue Garcia’s re-quel Texas Chainsaw Massacre could’ve been a masterpiece with a minor tonal shift from deadly self-serious to wryly self-knowing. As it stands, it falls into the same Stanley Kramer pit as the Candyman reboot, where lectures take the place of plot–and infant cardboard pedagogues take the place of legible characters. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the kind of graceless screed, in other words, that is everything its worst detractors accuse the original of being, making defending progressive messages in films like this difficult, if not impossible. Horror films in general–and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in particular–are rich in subtext. Horror as a genre is primal (all of the Old Testament is an anthology of vile horror stories), and, as such, it’s the first one to respond when toxins are introduced into our cultural ecosystem. Horror, for lack of a better descriptor, is potentially useful as both diagnosis of what’s wrong with us and prognostication of the consequences, should we allow the poison in our systems to run its course. What’s not helpful, however, are films that eschew subtext in favour of soapbox. If you empty the basement, your basement is empty. And if you enter into a thing with the idea that you’re about to force people to get smarter, you’d better be sure that you’re smarter than anyone who might want to watch your thing. Very few artists ever get away with being didactic.

Kimi (2022)

February 19, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Streaming, Thriller

***½/****
starring Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson, Derek DelGaudio, Robin Givens
written by David Koepp
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi is an escapist paranoia fantasy that has as its most unlikely conceit not any of its dire depictions of a techno-surveillance state, but that it’s possible for wealthy white men to see anything like consequences for their actions–actions up to, and including, murder. It may be Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp’s cleverest sting in a clever film, this notion that at a time when satire feels impossible because reality is so obscene, the greatest stretch of the imagination is the promise of meaningful accountability for the 1%. You could call it Pollyannaism or toxic positivity (and I confess my first response to how this movie ends was irritation), but I’ve come to realize how that speaks more to my disappointment with the world than with the story Kimi is trying to tell. This isn’t Night Moves or The Parallax View (or, more to the point, The Conversation or Blow Out), it’s a fable about how trauma can be overcome, justice can be won, and the bad guys don’t necessarily have to win every time. It could even be about how the future is minority and female and work-from-home. Or, thanks to one superb sequence, Kimi could be about a rejection of our desperate longing for superhuman intervention. Maybe it’s each of those things at once. All a revolution takes is enough individuals, flawed as they are, broken as they may be, deciding they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. All it would take is cutting through the noise and the moral cannibalism and finally painting a target on our common tormentors.

All the Moons (2020) – Shudder

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

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

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

A Hero (2021)

January 5, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Iran, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

Ghahreman
**½/****
starring Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadrorafaii, Sarina Farhadi
written and directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Walter Chaw A Hero is Asghar Farhadi's Iranian Neorealist version of Stephen Frears's gaudy American prestige flick Hero, in which a man lauded as one type of person is secretly another type of person, thus calling to the stand society's process for determining object choice and assigning value. Not a new conceit, in other words. Here, it's given Farhadi's "miserablist parade" approach, whereby the exhausted didacticism of the premise is meted out with the punishing drip-drip of water torture. Freed for 48 hours from a debtor's prison, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has a clandestine–because of divorce or something–meeting with his girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), who produces a handbag she's found abandoned that's full of gold coins. Problem solved, yes? No. Exchange rates being what they are in this global economy, the gold isn't quite enough to cover Rahim's obligations, and so he hatches a plan to make a big show out of giving the money back, the better to capitalize on his freshly-minted Good Samaritan persona. It works until it stops working, as these things do.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

December 21, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn’t mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn’t spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you’re riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it–run with it, for fuck’s sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it’s particularly undignified. It’s Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who’s way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. “Okay, okay, see, Neo is–haha–NEO is Mr. Anderson again and–haha, check it–he’s like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called ‘The Matrix’, and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait… What if Trinity was The One, too?” You’ve heard of the concept of “raising all boats”? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat–sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she’s holding. “Hi, I’m Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I’m drawing on an inside straight.” Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

The Novice (2021)

December 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sports, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsyth, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry
written and directed by Lauren Hadaway

by Walter Chaw Lauren Hadaway’s hyphenate debut The Novice is so good, so self-assured, so kinetic and so very much about something that, all hyperbole justified, it heralds the arrival of an important new artist. Garnering instant comparisons to Whiplash for its heart-attack-fuelled kineticism and hyperfocus on the obsessive, gnostic practice of an obscure discipline and to Black Swan for similar reasons as well as its troubled female protagonist, The Novice‘s closest analogue for me is actually Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, a film about the pursuit of knowledge and sublimity free of the depressingly quotidian limitations of the body. The Novice itself is free of Damien Chazelle’s preening and the literalness of the hero’s emotional fracture in Black Swan. Rather, it preaches the gospel of being fine with who you are not despite how fucked up and “intense” you might be, but because of that. At the end of all that auto-excavation, it says that the self, whatever its attendant flaws and hardwired weaknesses, has intrinsic value, and the knowledge of that value comes with immeasurable power. The title of Hadaway’s film recalls the Christian concept of the religious “novitiate,” that period where a person called to servitude enters into intense study, constant prayer, forced brotherhood, and an invasive interiority, all to prove whether or not they will be welcomed into the fold. In The Novice, the novitiate is Alex Dall, and the “fold” is everyone at her school who thinks she’s some kind of freak.