Telluride Archives - Page 5 of 6

Elevation

September 4, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2016

by Walter Chaw Telluride rests in a valley on the Western side of Colorado. It sits at 8,750 feet. You have to cross Monarch Pass (elevation approximately 12,000 feet) to get there from where I live, a six-and-a-half hour drive away. If you’re doing it right, you walk everywhere in Telluride, taking the free gondola service over the longer stretches up and down the mountain, and feeling the sharp constriction in your chest when your body, even one acclimated to a mile above sea level, discovers there’s noticeably less oxygen to breathe at such great heights. I wonder if mild hypoxia has something to do with my euphoria while I’m here. I am the best version of myself at the Telluride Film Festival, even as the festival itself continues to subtly decline by inevitably becoming more beholden to middlebrow interests and tastes at the same pace it now sells out the highest level of ticket package they make available. Not the ones you can buy off the website, the ones you secure through $100,000 donations.

Weltschmerz

September 18, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

by Walter Chaw On my way back down on US 50 to 285 to C470 and I70 and home, I pulled off at someplace carved into the side of a mountain, a lagoon fortified all around with rock and shattered wood and sand. I let out a breath and wondered how long I'd held it. I listened to the lap of water and the air and the spaces inside my head. I took my shoes off. I waded a little way in and schools of fry shoaled away from my feet in black clouds. The water? Frigid. Snow run-off. I could see the white of it, dotting the peaks around me, even now in early September where, still five hours away, it was over 90° in the shade–the last gasps of Colorado's brutal Indian summer.

Telluride ’15: Rams

September 15, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Iceland, Telluride, Telluride 2015

Hrútar
***½/****
starring Sigurður Sigurjónsson, Theodór Júlíusson, Charlotte Bøving, Gunnar Jónsson
written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson

by Walter Chaw There's a little of Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat in Grimur Hákonarson's Rams. Something of the formal beauty of La cinquième saison and the deadpan absurdity of Aki Kaurismaki's films as well. It is a story of brothers in conflict. More-functional recluse Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and less-functional recluse Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) are both hidden away in remote cabins in Iceland, tending to herds of sheep bred from a legendary stag whose lovingly-taxidermied head decorates Gummi's hovel's entryway. The picture opens in tension at a sheepherder's competition, where the prize stock is prodded and judged. And it ends in tension, as the two brothers, who haven't spoken in 40 years, must deal with the loss of everything while, just outside, an allegorical–but literal–storm obliterates the petty concerns of mortal men.

Telluride ’15: Beasts of No Nation

September 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015, War

**½/****
starring Idris Elba, Richard Pepple, Ama Abebrese, Abraham Attah
screenplay by Cary Fukunaga, based on the novel by Uzodinma Iweala
directed by Cary Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw A couple of days removed and I'm still not able to shake the scene where child soldier Agu (the amazing Abraham Attah) thinks he's been reunited with his mother, finds out he's mistaken, and metes out mercy/justice/betrayal in a sequence of events that ends with him standing on a box to peer out a window. He's a child. One of many in a roving platoon of fighters led by red-eyed Commandant (Idris Elba) through a nameless African country, wreaking havoc in a nameless conflict. Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Nigerian-born Uzondinma Iweala's debut novel is less politics than survey history of the transcendental war film. It's more wise about how something like this should look, in other words, than how it should feel, and the epiphany one has while watching it isn't that this kind of thing happens in the world all the time, across centuries and continents, but that Beasts of No Nation looks a lot like Come and See before it looks a lot like The Thin Red Line before, finally, it looks a lot like Apocalypse Now. Since we're comparing things, Kim Nguyen's War Witch (Rebelle) is the more powerful child-soldier film–mainly because it's about something other than the abomination of using children in war. Children in war as an abomination isn't a controversial stand. If that's all you have to say, well, it's not like I'm not listening, but I'm not impressed.

Telluride ’15: Anomalisa

September 11, 2015****/****, 2015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

****/****
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman

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.

Telluride ’15: Spotlight

September 10, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015, Thriller

***/****
starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy
directed by Tom McCarthy

by Walter Chaw Michael Keaton's a handsome guy. Not movie-star handsome in the traditional sense but, you know, not a dog. Everyday-guy handsome. Like Gene Hackman or Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. I think fans responded the way they did when Keaton was cast in Tim Burton's Batman (i.e., violently) because Keaton doesn't look like a superhero. He has an attractively average physique. His chin is soft and that's the bit you see under the mask. But then he puts on the suit and plays the role and you understand that Keaton is who he is for the chaos of his energy. Burton used him as muse before turning to Johnny Depp, I think, because of the mania of his persona. There is no other actor the equal of Beetlejuice. He replaced Pee-Wee Herman in Burton's progression through men-children. He's doomed to eternally be smarter than the characters he plays, and more interesting. He's the boy version of Illeana Douglas. Keaton in motion is a thing of wonder and danger. He's a perfect Batman because Batman's story arc inevitably leads to the place where he's seen as the Superego to Joker's Id–as the opposite side of the same Arkham coin. Keaton is Grant Morrison's Batman. He is the average-looking Warren Beatty. If he were making movies in the '70s, he would be Robert De Niro. There aren't a lot of movie stars I like better than Michael Keaton. He is the embodiment of aspiration and stick-to-it-iveness.

Telluride ’15: Room

September 9, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Telluride, Telluride 2015, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy
screenplay by Emma Donoghue, based on her novel
directed by Lenny Abrahamson

by Walter Chaw If you’ve read the book, you’ll probably like the movie. If you haven’t, like me, you’ll have some questions. Lenny Abrahamson’s Room is about how a child’s “plasticity” allows him to better recover from extreme psychological trauma. It’s about how the adults in said child’s life can aid in the process of recovery by hiding things from him and also letting him know that the reason the adults are better is because the child is a hero, and strong, and an appropriate catalyst for healing. That the adults’ mental health is, in fact, the child’s responsibility. I’m told the book is not exactly about those things, but then again, it’s not exactly not about those things. Many watching the film find in it a redemptive story about a mother’s relationship with her child. I find in it a seriously deranged, idealized fantasy in which an adorable little kid is given the weight of the world to carry and does so with no real ramifications for himself. I’d like to see a sequel to this film in which the little kid, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), reveals that he’s been keeping roadkill in jars in the storm shelter he’s moved into as a surrogate for his lost “room.” I think that’s the honest version of Room. You can leave comments at the bottom of this review that I will not read.

Telluride ’15: Carol

September 8, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015

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

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

Telluride ’15: Black Mass

September 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Telluride, Telluride 2015

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

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

Telluride ’15: Suffragette

September 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

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

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

Telluride ’15: 45 Years

September 6, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015, UK

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

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

Telluride ’15: Steve Jobs

September 6, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

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

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

72 Hours Each September

September 5, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

by Walter Chaw About three hours into the six-hour drive to Telluride, I feel something unknot. It's somewhere between my shoulder blades. My head clears. I find myself stopping more this year than I have in years past. I pull off onto more scenic overlooks. I push my teeth into the journey.

Telluride ’14: ’71

September 5, 2014****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK, War

****/****
starring Jack O’Connell, Paul Anderson, Richard Dormer, Sean Harris
screenplay by Gregory Burke
directed by Yann Demange

by Walter Chaw I’m old and stupid enough to have contextualized the “Troubles,” the armed conflict in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants, the IRA and the Brits, into a few U2 songs and that Paul Greengrass movie named after the same incident as…um, that one U2 song. I believed it was a tense period marked by a few unpleasant incidents. Yann Demange’s debut feature ’71 has shown me exactly how ignorant I’ve been of recent history, with a film he himself describes as an excoriation of our propensity, across nations and time, for sending our young men off to fight “dirty” wars. It’s absolutely harrowing, and it provides no respite to its tension. The best type of history, it’s alive and vital, thought-provoking and utterly, dispiritingly familiar. It reminded me a lot of Gallipoli; and as with Gallipoli, I feel like ’71 will be the moment a young actor (Jack O’Connell this time) becomes a star. It’s brilliantly shot, smart, and brutal. I went in it not knowing a thing about the film or what it portrayed and left a true believer.

Telluride ’14: Showcase for shorts

September 3, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, France, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK

Toutes des connes **/**** (France, 6 mins., d. François Jaros) Recently redubbed Life’s a Bitch, Toutes des connes is a fitfully-engaging relationship dramedy composed of a few dozen ultra-shorts featuring a guy (scriptor Guillaume Lambert) who breaks up with his girlfriend, goes through stages of grief and acceptance, then gets back together with the girl. It’s well done for what it is, but it feels like it needed half the time to be what it is. Toutes des connes doesn’t do anything surprising or innovative, announcing itself conspicuously as a calling-card film for director Jaros. Yes, I see that you can shoot and edit, though the grieving dude with the shaving-creamed face staring at the mirror thing was funnier in Raising Arizona.

Telluride ’14: Rosewater

September 2, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Haluk Bilginer, Shoreh Aghdashloo
screenplay by Jon Stewart, based on the book Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari
directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s hyphenate debut Rosewater, based on briefly-imprisoned Iranian-born Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came For Me, is painfully earnest, suffering from the first-timer disease of being both unimaginatively shot and laboriously About Something. It’s a message movie, and there’s no crime in that, but it’s laid out so carefully that any sense of tension–or drama, really–is sapped out of it, simplifying its message to the point of inconsequence and, eventually, making the picture vulnerable to mockery. Rosewater is one of those movies that makes you cringe because although you believe in its politics, it isn’t helping the cause. Consider the moment where one of Bahari’s jailers cracks wise about Abu Ghraib because America, see, is just as bad as Iran, maybe in many ways: I was distracted by the moist sound of 1,200 eyes rolling at the same time. It also doesn’t help that this issue film casts Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as Iranian-Canadian Bahari. This “best actor for the role” nonsense has to have a limit, lest Daniel Day-Lewis one day play Martin Luther King; this Christmas, Leonardo DiCaprio is Buddha. Chill out, we’re post-racial, brah! Rosewater is the kind of shit that gives liberals a bad name, and for as much as I like and often admire “The Daily Show”, it’s very much the movie the host of “The Daily Show” would make.

Telluride ’14: Two Days, One Night

September 2, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she’s too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It’s Petula Clark’s French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon’s “Needles and Pins,” “La Nuit N’en Finit Plus.” Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she’s so natural in this moment–in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It’s stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable–a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter (“Thank you, goodbye”) is identical each time. It’s through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there’s ever been.

Telluride ’14: Foxcatcher

September 1, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller

***½/****
starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
directed by Bennett Miller

by Walter Chaw Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher is timely because of its excoriation of the 1%–and timeless because of the care with which it handles relationships between men, and between men and their mothers. It has faith in its audience in a way that’s rare and always has been, leaving wide swaths of exposition buried in glances and gestures, making itself into something that’s very much like the amateur wrestling it ably recreates in the film. It’s a big movie composed of subtle movements; it’s reticent. It’s also grounded by unbelievable performances from Mark Ruffalo, an actor I really like who’s never been better; and Channing Tatum, who reduces himself to a pure distillation of his masculinity and will probably be underestimated as a result. An early moment with Ruffalo and Tatum–playing Olympic champion wrestlers and brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, respectively–as they train in a dingy little college gym, is grim and wordless, bloody and violent, and capped by Dave cuffing his little brother and asking for a hug as he drops him off. It’s brotherhood in its intimate complexity in just a few gestures.

Telluride ’14: The Imitation Game

August 31, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller, UK, War

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear
screenplay by Graham Moore
directed by Morten Tyldum

by Walter Chaw Benedict Cumberbatch is amazing, truly, in Morten Tyldum’s better version of A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game. Based on the life of logician and mathematician Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park genius who broke the Enigma code but was later pilloried for his homosexuality, the film is conventional in every way save Cumberbatch, who, frankly, had never particularly appealed to me before now. His Turing is clearly (to a guy in the middle of all this sudden awareness of Autism) somewhere on the Autism spectrum, incapable of building relationships and understanding metaphors, making him the perfect person, in his (mis)understanding of the world, to break codes. All language and every subtlety of human interaction is a puzzle for him, you see; breaking the unbreakable German Enigma cipher is simply another of the same variety. The Imitation Game, however, is crystal clear, lockstep in narrative and exposition and careful to leave no child behind as it explains how Turing and his team of irregulars managed to build the first computer and defeat the Nazi war machine by intercepting its communications. At the end, its message is the same as The Incredibles‘, though housed in a far more conventional motor: different is good, and you shouldn’t criminalize homosexuality, because what if a gay guy is the saviour of the free world and you just chemically-castrated him and caused him to kill himself? As messages go, that’s not a tough one to get behind.

Telluride ’14: Wild

August 30, 20142014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

**/****
starring Reese Witherspoon, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Laura Dern
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel by Cheryl Strayed
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Wild is exactly what you think it will be and is that for what feels like forever. It’s the inspirational true story of smack-addicted party girl Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), who, after reading a lot of well-known volumes of collected verse, cleans out an REI store and sets out to walk the PCT up the Western coast. And she likes Snapple. Yeah, it’s a commercial about regaining white privilege after trying to give it away, complete with more rapey moments than expected. That’s not fair: Cheryl doesn’t so much give her privilege away as indulge in the perks of it to the point where a trio of hale, happy-go-lucky trail-bums dub her the “Queen of the PCT” for all the favours and special treatment she receives along the way. It also takes time for Cheryl to thank REI for being her most favouritest corporation ever for replacing her faulty boots, so that happened.