Theatrical Archives - Page 14 of 65

The Snowman (2017)

October 22, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini and Søren Sveistrup, based on the novel by Jo Nesbø
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman, an adaptation of the seventh in Jo Nesbø’s literary crime series, treats its narrative as gestural performance art: a suggestion of a suggestion of genre. When it’s fascinating, it operates with a certain dream logic, where one thing leads to another thing senselessly, nightmarishly, the dreamer buoyed along powerless to affect his own fate within the larger, obscure narrative. Harrison Ford famously complained that Blade Runner is a movie about a detective who doesn’t do any detecting. The Snowman is a movie about a detective who can’t do any detecting because there isn’t any connective tissue. No matter what the teasing notes left by its serial killer claim, there are no clues. It’s very much like Andrew Fleming’s own abortive attempt at a franchise, Nancy Drew, which is also alien in its behaviour, acting like a movie would act if it were made by a sea cucumber. Consider a scene in The Snowman that pushes the story to its conclusion: there’s a revelation, a key piece of evidence or something, and a location, and the heroine, Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), stands up at her desk. A male colleague, who was sitting in a cubicle across from Katrine, suddenly teleports to the balcony above her as she leaves. He asks if she’s all right. The better question would be if there was so little footage shot that every bit of it was used, continuity be damned. The great Thelma Schoonmaker was brought in at the eleventh hour, presumably at the behest of executive producer Martin Scorsese (once slated to direct the film), in a presumed attempt to save the project. Schoonmaker, for everything she’s great at, was never that great at continuity under the best of circumstances. Something Scorsese played around with in Shutter Island. Something that occasionally turns The Snowman into a Gertrude Stein piece.

The Florida Project (2017)

October 17, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Sean Baker’s The Florida Project follows the day-to-day of a group of five- or six-year-olds as they run wild through the broken-down streets, hot-sheet motels, and abandoned buildings that serve as the ramshackle spokes radiating out from Disney World in Orlando. Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is the ringleader, impossibly exuberant and sly in exactly and only the way a six-year-old in full operational mode can be. She is a force of nature, and Prince’s performance is entirely unaffected. It’s a miracle. Moonee’s best friends are Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), and they roam far afield, standing on picnic tables, exploring empty housing units, experimenting with lighters, and scamming ice-cream cones from marks more exhausted by their pitch (“I have asthma and my doctor said that I…”) than convinced by it. I was free like this when I was 5. I grew up in downtown Golden, Colorado, which has as its main identifying feature a wooden sign stretching across its “main” street (“Washington”) that says “Howdy Folks!” I used to catch flies and shine shoes in the barbershop on the corner. The barber was the mayor, Frank. I spent the pennies I earned at the 5 and 10 across the street. The Florida Project is about that.

The Foreigner (2017)

October 15, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Jackie Chan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan’s Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy’s farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter’s death. It’s a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn’t a great film, but it’s an interesting one for all its mediocrity.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

October 4, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It’s opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they’ve all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps–and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren’t any questions left for Villeneuve’s picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It’s a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn’t belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg’s A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.

mother! (2017)

September 15, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Darren Aronofsky’s mother! seeks to explain the ways of God to Man in an allegory of the monstrousness of the creative impulse that plays at once as apologia and barbaric yawp-cum-mission statement; imagine if Aronofsky adapted Paradise Lost. It’s The Giving Tree and Harlan Ellison’s “Try a Dull Knife” as told by Buñuel and Ken Russell: a marriage of essential truth with exceptional excess–a work of genuine arrogance and pretension. The picture aspires to answer large questions, to lay bare the heart of the artist, and it has as few apologies to offer as it does fucks to give. It’s unpleasant to the point of unwatchability–an instant entry into the films maudit hall of fame, predicting a popular failure and critical evisceration that are at least in part something Aronofsky must have expected, given how dedicated mother! is to destroying pleasure, to refusing the breast that its unnamed female protagonist (we’ll call her X, in honour of Joan Fontaine’s similarly anonymous heroine from Rebecca), played by Jennifer Lawrence, offers her infant in one of the multifarious religious tableaux that litter the piece. In fact, were the film a river to be crossed, the stones you’d step on would all be depictions of holy martyrs and Madonnas. In this way, it resembles Children of Men–even through to its long urban war and siege sequence, which mother! replicates during its feverish conclusion. It resembles Viridiana, of course, and The Exterminating Angel. It resembles all the great symbolist films because it’s one of them.

It (2017)

September 7, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

It: Chapter One
****/****
starring Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw There’s a girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis), she must be around thirteen or so, she’s standing in front of a wall of tampons at the drugstore, trying to make a decision on her own because her dad (Stephen Bogaert) is alone, and a creep, you know, a little scary in how he keeps asking her if she’s still his “little girl.” So she has to do this by herself, even though it’s embarrassing–but she’s doing it. The next aisle over, a few boys, they call themselves “The Losers” because why not, everyone else does, are gathering medical supplies to help the new kid, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who’s been cut up pretty bad by bully Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). They need a distraction because they don’t have enough money to pay, so Bevvie provides one, and now she’s a “Loser,” too. I read Stephen King’s It in September of 1986, when I was thirteen. Thirteen exactly the age of its heroes in the “past” of the book, the flashback portion that’s paralleled with the kids, as adults, called back to the Derry, ME of their youth, where they had forgotten that, once upon a time, they fought a thing and won. There is nothing better when you’re thirteen than Stephen King. It was my favourite book for a while, although I didn’t entirely understand why. I think I might now. Better, I believe Andy Muschietti, director of the underestimated Mama, and his team of three screenwriters, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, understand that what works about It isn’t the monster, but the fear of childhood as it metastasizes into the fear of adulthood–and how those two things are maybe not so different after all.

Logan Lucky (2017)

August 17, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig
written by Rebecca Blunt
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Steven Soderbergh returns from a self-imposed retirement of all of four years with Logan Lucky, a heist movie so steeped in its maker’s creative and commercial history that it casually makes time in its climactic moments for a newscaster to dub its working-class heroes’ shenanigans “Ocean’s 7/11.” Begging to be read as an unnecessary but enjoyable victory lap from a filmmaker who hasn’t gone away so much as temporarily opted out of the rat race of alternating between formalist exercises, crowd-pleasers, and prestige pictures, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh working in his most amiable register–and for the most part doffing his aesthetic predilection for piss-yellow lighting–while still cycling through his pet interests of late. A polymath by nature, as evidenced by his annual viewing logs, Soderbergh more or less successfully wields Logan Lucky into a charming sampler platter of his tastes, from hitting genre story beats faithfully to realizing the smallest procedural details and celebrating sincere Americana while bemoaning its toxic corporatization.

Detroit (2017)

August 10, 20172017, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie
written by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Alex Jackson Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is painfully afraid of controversy. It’s as though Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were given the assignment to make a film about the 1967 Algiers Motel incident and cringed their way through it, trying their best to alienate neither black nor white audiences. Hilariously, the end result has now become one of the most controversial films of the year. An essay by Jeanne Theoharis, Say Burgin, and Mary Phillips (a trio of academics in political science, history, and African American studies, respectively) recently published on the HUFFINGTON POST denounced it as “the most irresponsible and dangerous movie of the year.” Angelica Jade Bastien of ROGEREBERT.COM states that she left the theatre in tears, not because of the violence so much as the “emptiness” behind the violence. And, of course, Armond White had to get his licks in, concluding, “Watching black people being brutalized seems to satisfy some warped liberal need to feel sorry.” Looks like I was wrong! Black film critics, at least, seem to fucking hate this movie.

The Dark Tower (2017)

August 6, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, Western

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King’s revered Dark Tower series, I’d probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence’s Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-’90s–the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”, Jamie Delano’s “Animal Man”, Grant Morrison’s “Doom Patrol”, and Delano/Garth Ennis’s “Hellblazer”, which of course formed the basis for Lawrence’s picture. But I don’t. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn’t jibe with images and rhythms I’d conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should’ve cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he’s been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won’t you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake’s parents’ kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he’s from, there’s no chicken.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

July 30, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones
screenplay Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, written by Antony Johnson and illustrated by Sam Hart
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Essentially No Way Out with less hot sex but better action sequences, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde is a lot of truly dreary Cold War spy intrigue interrupted periodically, but not often enough, by the good stuff. It proposes the antiquated notion that collusion with the Russians is treason in having heroic MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron–Mr. F after all, all this time) take ice baths and try to figure out who mysterious mole "Satchel" is in the last days of East Berlin. Her contact there is skeezy Percival (James McAvoy) whose handlers fear has gone a bit "feral" in the field. We're introduced to him trading Jim Beam and blue jeans for information and waking up with two girls (two!) to pick up Lorraine at the airport. There's also a French spy named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) who offers up a Sapphic love interest for Lorraine and ends up the way that lovers end up in spy movies. Leitch, an uncredited co-director on John Wick, brings the same style of kinetic, close-in martial arts and, eventually, gunplay of that film, but missteps badly by, among other things, making this about more than avenging a dead dog. Without an emotional charge–and there isn't enough of one generated by the loss of two of Lorraine's lovers–there's no real sense of emotion or energy in the action scenes. They're super cool, don't get me wrong (at least they are until Leitch decides at the very end to overuse slow motion), but they lack motivation and investment. But that's the least of Atomic Blonde's problems.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

July 22, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer
written for the screen and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw Effortlessly, almost guilelessly sexist in the way that only a 12-year-old with lacklustre breeding can be, Luc Besson’s latest opus of antsy expressionism, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (hereafter Valerian), is so relentlessly puerile, so unapologetically awful, that there’s absolutely no chance it won’t become a midnight masterpiece. Not one of the good ones, like Besson’s own The Fifth Element or The Professional (or The Messenger, curiously the most historically accurate Joan of Arc film), but one of the ones that are the feature-length equivalent of that repetitive noise your 9-year-old son makes when you’re driving him to a friend’s house. It’s an interminable adaptation of the Ruby Rhod sequence from The Fifth Element, an endurance test of unusual cruelty and imagination. If you’re sensing some grudging admiration for it, you’re not wrong. It’s like going to a torture museum and marvelling at the level of invention and craftsmanship dedicated to the methods to which humans go to discomfit one another. Some of that sadistic shit is worth millions–priceless, even.

Dunkirk (2017)

July 21, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, France, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I’m a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don’t like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there’s a real heart in there. It’s a bad science-fiction movie, but it’s a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it’s puffed-up full of itself, and it’s about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It’s going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It’s like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

July 15, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Amiah Miller
written by Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw There are two problems that plague War for the Planet of the Apes. The first is that this far along into a franchise, it becomes a real burden to deal with the lore of eight (is it eight?) previous instalments; the second is that Rise… and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, this sequel’s two immediate predecessors, are so subtle and intelligent that there’s a real danger now of being too “on the nose” in trying to keep up with them. That co-writer/director Matt Reeves is able to wrangle both tigers to the extent that he does speaks to his skill. That he’s not able to entirely avoid a mauling speaks to the near-impossibility of the task. What was before an elegant parable of race and tribalism, dehumanization and Turing empathy tests, is now well and truly a blockbuster franchise product. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s obvious, transitioning from a very fine, elegiac western like a late Ford or an any-time Anthony Mann into, by the end, first a broad and winking take on Apocalypse Now, then a carefully-narrated Moses allegory. Consider a moment where the ersatz Kurtz, The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), speaks to our chimp hero Caesar (a motion-captured Andy Serkis) about the cost of vengeance and the sacrifices made during war that allow him to paint himself as Abraham even as he transitions into Pharaoh. Everyone’s fantastic in the scene; the problem is that its expository payload is mainly meant to set up the Charlton Heston film that started it all. Too, it confuses the characters of its parables in such a way as to suggest, uncomfortably, a connection between Jews and their persecutors, and a concentration camp/Egyptian slave narrative involving the persecution of apes for cheap labour only adds to the confusion. Oh, also, they’re building a wall that Caesar calls “madness” that will solve nothing.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

July 7, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr.
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Jon Watts & Christopher Ford and Chris McKenna & Eric Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw A painfully adequate entry in the ever-expanding MCU, Spider-Man: Homecoming has the benefit of a brilliant young lead in Tom Holland and a fantastically-layered villain turn by Michael Keaton, but it bears the burden of all the films that came before it and all those yet to come. There’s a lot of checking-off of boxes, in other words, with Homecoming reminding most of Ant-Man in that there seems to be a good standalone movie in here somewhere that keeps getting diverted into looking backwards and forwards. There was an episode of “St. Elsewhere” where a patient believed himself to be Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. Midway through, he spots Betty White, who had a recurring role on “St. Elsewhere”, and calls out “Sue Ann!,” the name of her character on “Mary Tyler Moore”. Both programs were produced by MTM, by the way, the company founded by Moore and ex-husband Grant Tinker. To enjoy that episode of the show completely would require knowledge of the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its production company. It’s a living example of the concept of post-modernism: a product based on nothing but itself and reliant entirely on the insular knowledge of a small group of fetishists. Such is the fire in which fandom is born, and Spider-Man: Homecoming is the natural product of that: an origin story that doesn’t provide an origin because the previous incarnations of this story have provided it already; and film number 19 or 20 or something in a series that includes television shows and comic-book runs that, at this point, would require someone with absolutely nothing else to do to keep track of it. That’s another fire in which fandom is born.

The Beguiled (2017)

June 23, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning
written for the screen and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola tells Romanticist versions of one transitional moment in her life. She turns it in her hand to see where the light catches it. Her films are examinations of the liminal field between girlhood and womanhood, littered with casualties and trenches, the one left behind and the other ahead, maybe eternally out of reach. Her moment is immortalized one way in father Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to cast her as the main love interest in The Godfather Part III, a late replacement for Winona Ryder. Sofia’s failure, and her father’s betrayal of her by failing to protect her from it, is traumatic, though perhaps not much more than any adolescence–just public, cast into the collective, as it were, for the wolves to worry. It is one of a select company of misfires that is almost universally known. Sofia immortalizes the devastation of her experience in movies that speak, lyrically, to the tragedy of coming-of-age for a young woman. Hers is as coherent and important a body of work as any contemporary filmmaker’s, made more so, perhaps, by her status as the only woman director in the United States permitted to explore an elliptical, unpopular theme across several projects.

Cars 3 (2017)

June 20, 20172017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Kiel Murray and Bob Peterson and Mike Rich
directed by Brian Fee

by Walter Chaw I don’t understand very much about the Cars universe. I don’t understand its rules. Do the sentient cars feel pain? What part of them needs to “die” in order for them to die? The implication is that the voice actor needs to die, but even then the Paul Newman-voiced “Doc” is resurrected (along with Tom Magliozzi’s “Rusty”) in Cars 3 through the miracle of old voice outtakes and flashback sequences. It raises questions about sentience in a Blade Runner sort of way. It invites speculation that this is all a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which our “smart” cars have either outlasted, or outwitted, their primate creators. I wonder, too, about how they reproduce, as these films have always been clear that there are “children” in this universe. Or are they like child vampires: wizened monsters trapped in infant chassis? When I look at a sentient ambulance in this one’s central “Flesh Fair” demolition-derby sequence and how its patient bay is built for a human-sized customer and not a car, well…it raises questions. And let’s talk about the idea of a demolition derby in a film populated entirely by thinking, feeling cars. What would the human equivalent to this be? Thunderdome? It’s worth a conversation, though it’s not the conversation Cars 3 wants to have.

The Mummy (2017)

June 10, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical, Tom Cruise, Zombie

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman
directed by Alex Kurtzman

by Walter Chaw It took me a while but it finally clicked about an hour into Alex Kurtzman’s hilarible The Mummy that the whole thing wasn’t a really bad movie, but a really bad videogame in bad-movie form. It has the same alternating cadence of leaden exposition drop, interminable and hideously- animated/performed cut-scene, and standard FPS-strictured gameplay culminating in a boss fight. Envisioned as the launch for Universal’s “Dark Universe” franchise (in which the pantheon of classic Universal Monsters are given gritty action reboots, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style), it finally functions as a first-generation “Resident Evil” port in which the dialogue, for what it’s worth, was written in Japanese, translated into English, and performed by 64 pixels stacked on top of each other. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe the desperation with which all involved try to seductively reveal/hide their Dark Universe™ Easter eggs while hobbling from one big, button-geeking, CGI-hobbled moment to the next. Look, behind those dust zombies: it’s Dr. Frankenstein’s lab!

Wonder Woman (2017)

June 2, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Danny Huston
screenplay by Allan Heinberg
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman gets it. I knew it the instant Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), stationed in a trench on the Western Front sometime in the last days of the Great War, decides not to let people she could be saving die and climbs into the poignantly-named “No Man’s Land.” “No Man’s Land,” right? But maybe a woman’s. The fight choreography isn’t very good here, but the film is less about that than it is about why we fight. It asks that question a lot. At the moment of crisis, once Wonder Woman realizes who she is and defines herself as a hero, she declares that she fights for love. It’s more courageous to say something like that, baldly and unashamedly, in this, our age of sophisticated, sardonic, superior detachment. That’s why I cried when she climbs into battle in an unwinnable conflagration, because, you know, this is the DC movies harking back to the Christopher Reeve Superman to present us with a nostalgic view of superheroes, from when they cared a lot about us. When they fought for love and not Byronic self-actualization or to avenge some petty slight. When our heroes believed in us, more than we believe in ourselves. When they were, in fact, the best version of who we wanted to be.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)

May 27, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Theatrical

*/****
starring Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Brenton Thwaites, Geoffrey Rush
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg

by Walter Chaw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (hereafter Pirates 5) is stultifyingly boring, which is interesting because lots of stuff happens in it, constantly. It's guilty of a kind of antic, Brownian motion that suggests all of the repugnance inspired by a bivouac of army ants and none of the creepy sense of underlying order. It's like watching stirred tea: brown and insensible. Just like. Consider the first major set-piece, in which our jolly Roger, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp, starting to look like those leather bags you find at Himalayan shops), conspires with his truncated crew to steal a giant iron safe and ends up stealing the entire bank. The entire bank, savvy? Compare it against the brilliance of the train sequence in 2013's The Lone Ranger to appreciate exactly how underestimated that film was, and exactly how estimated this one is. There's a team of horses, a little person, a building being dragged through an island town, shit flying everywhere, and Capt. Jack doing Buster Keaton if Buster Keaton weren't an artist and were, instead, an aging actor most of the audience is beginning to suspect is playing himself now. Later, there's a cameo by Paul McCartney and, you know, same, same. The posture is rock 'n' roll when really it's one of those "Top of the Charts" cover compilations gamely put together by the house band. It sucks. If it makes you feel cheated, well, you were.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

May 19, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw When you call your film “Prometheus,” you’re borrowing centuries of critical thought, grafting yourself to the idea of the ascension of Christianity on the backs of vanquished pantheons and suggesting the mischief in stealing the light of Heaven (the better with which to build your own unholy automatons). Mary Shelley knew this when she subtitled Frankenstein “Or, the Modern Prometheus,” and Ridley Scott knew this, too, when he partnered with everyone’s favourite half-assed theologian/philosopher/one-eyed king Damon Lindelof to make a prequel to one of his two or three movies that are worth a damn, Alien. Not content to leave well enough alone, Scott is back with Alien: Covenant (hereafter Covenant), whose title invokes either a promise made by God as represented by Jesus’s crucifixion in the Christian New Testament, or the promises God makes in the Old Testament to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David–each of which, Christians may tell you, predicts the New Covenant. The old ones were written in stone, you see, but the new one is written on your heart. Another Shelley, Percy, makes a cameo in this one as his “Ozymandias” is recited at some length, reminding mainly that it was used better, and more subtly, in “Breaking Bad”. There, it was assumed the viewer knew the piece in question. The film narrates it. It’s the difference between being respectful of your audience, and being a pretentious dick.