Theatrical Archives - Page 15 of 65

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.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

May 14, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

***/****
starring Charlie Hunnam, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Djimon Honsou, Eric Bana
screenplay by Jody Harold and Guy Ritchie & Lionel Wigram
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw This is the part where I confirm I've read my Malory and Pyle, my T.H. White, of course. That I've seen Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Sword in the Stone and any number of First Knights, including even Unidentified Flying Oddball, which I loved when I was a kid easily-scarred by that weird android doppelgänger of Dennis Dugan's wayward astronaut. I was a big fan, too, of Choose Your Own Adventure #86: Knights of the Round Table. In other words, one of the most popular Western myths went pile-driving through the three decades of my relative cultural sentience. When I had a brief obsession with WWII, I brushed up on all the literature just to better understand why the British saw Churchill as the Once and Future King. Just last year, one of 2016's best films, Jackie, featured an extended sequence in which the titular widow wandered through the White House listening to the score from Camelot. Even my early Lego fantasies with the Castle playsets featured an adultery subplot where my French best friend made off with my Queen. I'm not a fan, then, so much as a victim of the mythology's ubiquity.

Snatched (2017)

May 14, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Joan Cusack, Ike Barinholtz
written by Katie Dippold
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Walter Chaw Snatched is an unbearable piece of shit about an unbearable piece of shit (Amy Schumer) and her mother (Goldie Hawn), who get kidnapped for ransom in Ecuador and eventually escape into Colombia. Being an unbearable piece of shit is, of course, Amy Schumer’s shtick, and she plays it to the hilt here as Emily, a self-absorbed, selfie-obsessed piece of shit who gets dumped by her boyfriend (Randall Park, describing their respective career trajectories in his only bit of dialogue) after losing her job. Said boyfriend is a rocker about to go big and be inundated with “hundreds of pussies,” breaking the ice on the vagina jokes that begin with the title, sort of, and continue more or less unabated for ninety interminable minutes. Fans of Schumer will be reminded that her vagina smells like soup. It occurs to me that the only way this film could have been good would be if Tom Green were starring in it and it was twenty years ago. Tom Green was brave. Amy Schumer is not brave.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

May 4, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Kurt Russell
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw Twice as desperate/half as good, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (hereafter GOTG2) is still sort of fun even if the moments of delirious, spontaneous joy we’d come to know from the previous film are few and far between. Arguably, only the opening title sequence, which seems to make sport a little tiny bit of the marketing insanity around “Dancing Baby Groot,” really hits the right balance of self-knowledge and sticking the landing. Consider, though, that even in that sequence there’s too long spent on the same “stoplight” gag from the first film’s mid-credits scene where Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) stops dancing whenever Drax (Dave Bautista) looks at him. When you’re making a hip in-joke reference to a stinger buried in the end titles of your prequel, you’ve gone deep into the post-modern. Absent, too, for the most part, is the ease of “Vol. 1″‘s familial subplot, dragged as it is into the foreground and forced into exposition as each troubled member of the titular gang has a moment to wax eloquent (and at length) about how they only ever wanted a dad/sister/family/daughter/wife/son/I get it already. What’s left is a movie that feels arrogant, somehow, as though it knows by its nature that it’s critic proof and will make a bajillion dollars and is now the 800lb gorilla in the Marvel room. Just exactly like that, come to think of it.

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

April 1, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

Personal Shopper (2016)

March 24, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eisinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw There’s a brilliant song by Patty Griffin called “Every Little Bit” that, among other piquant turns of phrase, includes the lyric “I still don’t blame you for leaving, baby, it’s called living with ghosts.” At around the 30-minute mark of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, our survivor Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tells a confidante she had made a vow with her late twin brother to make contact from beyond the grave should one pre-decease the other. “And then?” he asks. “I guess I’ll live my life and let it go.” Then a long, gliding shot of Maureen riding her moped through the Parisian nighttime scored to simple, haunted strings that are augmented towards the end of the sequence by percussion, which reveals itself to be a pencil against parchment. Maureen works as a personal shopper for a German fashionista who never seems to be home. In her off moments, she helps her brother’s “widowed” girlfriend Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) try to suss out if his ghost is unquiet and lurking in the house they shared. Maureen’s a medium, you see, or at least she and her brother played at being mediums–a morbid pastime informed by a heart ailment, unpredictably mortal, shared by the siblings. A doctor warns her against any strenuous activities or emotions. She’ll suffer both before the end.

Beauty and the Beast (2017)

March 21, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Stephen Chbosky and Bill Condon, based on the screenplay by Linda Woolverton
directed by Bill Condon

by Walter Chaw Three cheers for Disney’s dedication to diversity. I saw a production of “A Christmas Carol” last year with a fully integrated cast. It made no sense, but hooray for diversity at any cost, even at the expense of sense–even at the risk of self-parody. Even when it doesn’t move the ball, necessarily. I’m not talking about making Gaston’s fawning sidekick LeFou (Josh Gad) overtly gay instead of merely coding him as such, I’m talking about making every other person a person of colour for the express purpose of being on the right side of some imaginary, constantly-moving but unforgiving line in history. Sometimes, it’s a good thing; sometimes it feels desperate; and sometimes, it’s just premature. When it’s good, it looks like Disney’s Rogue One, where the diversity spoke to oppressed cultures revolting against a fascist, white-nationalist regime. When it’s not good, it looks clueless. We’re not a post-racial society; presenting us as such, burdened as it is by the damning weight of good intentions, comes with the danger of excreting another Cloud Atlas fantasy–the type of movie the white people in Get Out would make: tone-deaf and offensive at worst. Or, as with this live-action Beauty and the Beast, just sort of silly and twee.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

March 13, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly
screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly
directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts

by Walter Chaw The thing about porn flicks is that few visit them for their plot and characterizations. Enter Kong: Skull Island, monster porn in which a group of people visit the titular monster on the titular island and witness monster-on-monster violence in a series of very expensive-seeming and escalating tableaux. This is, in and of itself, neither indictment nor recommendation, just observation that porn is good for two things: jerking-off and sociological ruminations. Some would say those are one and the same; I would say that if you want to know what a society is concerned about, you could do worse than vet popular porn categories. I would also offer that the topic of miscegenation, which the vast majority of folks pretend not to think about very much, appears to be of primary importance when it comes to pornography. Many porn actresses, in fact, delay their first “interracial” (code for white women with black men, generally) scene until after they’ve sold their amateur and anal statuses. It’s the last taboo before there are no new lands to conquer. And, for the most part, porn plays into that trepidation as a product of the standard social stereotype of black men having larger dicks and a greater level of commensurate sexual savagery than their meeker Caucasian counterparts. Let’s not even talk about the cashew-hung Asian. Ditto, there doesn’t seem to be much of a mainstream market for black porn actresses (over-sexed), though Asian women do attract a premium for the mystique afforded them in South Pacific brothels during WWII. No study of primatology is complete without a careful survey of their sexual proclivities, after all.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) + Logan (2017)

March 3, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Action, Drama, Horror, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
***/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua
screenplay by Mike Carey, based on his novel
directed by Colm McCarthy

LOGAN
****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Movements start this way, with one or two events that could be thought of as coincidence in response to some greater trend in our culture, perhaps–or, more likely, in response to some greater corruption. I’ve long referred to movies, especially genre movies, as indicator species in our cultural swamp. They’re the first to show evidence of introduced toxins; at minimum, they’re the first major art form to disseminate warnings widely. Jordan Peele’s sleeper hit Get Out is just the latest in a recent spate of pictures that have caught the zeitgeist. Test the theory: would it have been as popular in another time? Movies are not unlike Percy Shelley’s “dead thoughts… Like wither’d leaves” carried on divine winds to quicken new births. It’s a florid reference to justify an unpopular concept. Not religious in any way, I find sublimity in the idea that human hands work in concert sometimes, and the close study of their products can provide insight into the world as it is, not simply as it was. Find in James Mangold’s Logan and Colm McCarthy’s more or less contemporaneous The Girl with All the Gifts (hereafter Girl) complementary, near identical concepts executed in largely the same way–proof for me of a body politic reacting in concert to poison. As grim as they are (with Logan actually verging on vile and mean-spirited), they are nonetheless, to me, evidence of at least some collective immune response. Artifacts of resistance left for the anthropologists. Despite their apparent nihilism, they are proof, as referenced explicitly in Girl, of hope.

Get Out (2017)

February 25, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw It’s the easiest thing in the world to make a movie about bigots; it’s a lot harder to make a movie about liberals who mean well, but are feckless elites who not only don’t make things better, they actually, through their platitudes and paternalistic attitudes, make things worse. It’s about money. If anything has been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that everything’s about money. The villains of Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out aren’t white people–they’re rich white people. (Its closest analogue is Brian Yuzna’s Society.) A movie about white privilege, it’s a comedian’s film in that, like the best comedians, it recognizes some awkward truisms and makes them manifest in a situation that builds on itself. This is a great set. It gets on a roll. Its central riff is a complicated one: rich white liberals are so detached and alien that through their best intentions, they’re actively responsible for the continued oppression of minorities in the United States. There was a string of films in 2016 that raised this as a possibility (I Am Not Your Negro and OJ: Made in America high among them), but in Get Out the idea has found its natural home in the horror genre. The bookend to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, it even shares the same set-up for a radical “down” ending. The decision Get Out makes at that terminal crossroads says everything. It’s a challenge to the audience to check their own attitudes about how black men are demonized in our culture: abusers of white women, sexually threatening to white men, and murderers of both; angry and bestial.

The Great Wall (2016)

February 22, 20172016, 2017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Fantasy, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau
screenplay by Carlo Bernard & Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Gloriously, fantastically stupid from beginning to end, Fifth Generation legend Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall is also, you know, not terrible on the grand scale of terrible things. The popular narrative around this picture is the casting of Matt Damon as some sort of “white saviour” in a film about China’s most notable architectural achievement–except that it’s not really about the Wall and Damon doesn’t really save anything, though he does put to rest any sort of debate about whether or not he’s a credible action star…or even star star. He tries on an Irish accent here that consists mainly of his trying to talk around a marble. That is, when he remembers he’s supposed to be doing an accent. It’s Kevin Costner-as-Robin Hood levels of comically horrific, and, just like Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Great Wall is an attempt to grit-up and culturally contextualize some ridiculous rural folktale. The folktale, in this instance, is Zhang’s own classic Red Sorghum, which earned him some trouble upon release because of its depiction of the old men running the Chinese government as senile, corrupt, and perverse. Indeed, The Great Wall depicts Chinese leadership as tradition-bound in a bad way, its “emperor” figure a child hiding behind his throne. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see the monstrous child in Red Sorghum grown into this pathetic figure of a leader. If the film weren’t so stupid, in other words, it would probably have gotten Zhang in trouble again.

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

February 19, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness is lurid unto beautiful, exquisite pulp, just barmy enough to attract a cult and just smart enough to deserve it. The central conceit is that humans are only really good as biological filters for pollutants; in place of the batteries of The Matrix, the film sees people as distilleries for some sort of immortality potion. The process kills them. I learned when I was young that rabies is a kind of fear of water: its sufferers die of thirst even surrounded by water. The old, rich, white/white-collar victims of A Cure for Wellness entomb themselves in an alpine sanatorium invested in hydrotherapy in hopes of feeling, you know, better. Their sickness is of the soul, alas. The irony of the water cure offered by their ostensible saviours is that the patients become desiccated, mortally. There seems to be a message in there about how the illness of soulless acquisition is self-inflicted, and the amount expended in solution only exacerbates it. Money is bad. The making of it is incestuous, perverse, and insatiable. It’s a strange thing to say in a movie that cost a lot of money, but the point is well taken. Especially now.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

February 15, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane
written by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw There’s something of Highlander in John Wick: Chapter 2, this idea that there are people-looking things walking among us, wrestling for control of something, jockeying for arcane positions in mysterious hierarchies. It’s disturbing in the best way; dislocating, world-building. It’s what makes stuff like The Matrix work, the suggestion that there’s a reality underlying ours–and in a scene among pigeons on top of a New York tenement, the film features a Matrix reunion where Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) greets Neo (Keanu Reeves) with a “been a long time” nod. John Wick: Chapter 2 is meta in a way that fits exactly right into the feeling of a picture that spends most of its time building on the alternate universe introduced in the original. It’s aligned right there with M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and the possibility that there are comic-book worlds outside of DC and Marvel and they’re, what’s the word? They’re amazing.

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

February 12, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Superhero, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Jared Stern & John Whittington
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Ugly, loud, twenty minutes too long, and half as clever as it thinks it is, Cartoon Network stalwart Chris McKay’s The Lego Batman Movie is saved from becoming something other than Shrek: Longform Commercial by a single scene that demonstrates a genuine emotional knowledge of the Batman character: Batman (a returning Will Arnett), after a long day of antic motion, stays up by himself in his immense, empty home, gazing at a picture of his dead parents and wishing they could have seen how he turned out. It happens early, though, and the rest of the picture’s content to make fun of DC lore (“It’s worth a Google!” says Joker (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), having listed a few of the stupider villains in Batman’s rogue’s gallery) while attempting occasional earnestness here and there along the long road to the standard kid-fare message of “family is where you find it.” The Lego Batman Movie is both fan-pleasing and self-loathing, placing it in the company of the wave of faux-nostalgia garbage millennials wear now like that tenth-generation McGinty claiming Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day. A low bar for inauthenticity, and by the third or fourth joke about how corny the old TV show is, you remember the old TV show had more meta intelligence in any ten minutes of a given episode than the whole of this exhausting exercise.

Silence (2016)

January 17, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mexico, Taiwan, Theatrical

****/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s Silence is Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Not Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Not Masahiro Shinoda’s Chinmoku. Rather than a Japanese perspective, it’s told from the perspective of our most notoriously Catholic filmmaker (next to Mel Gibson, but he went to a different church), who, at the end of his life, has found this cap to a trilogy about faith and doubt begun in The Last Temptation of Christ (an adaptation of a novel by Greek author) and Kundun (about the life of the Dalai Lama)–films, each, that explore mystery and land somewhere personal and inherently unknowable, as faith is and should be. It’s an essentially Romanticist text, not Humanist like Endo’s or doom-laden and progressive like Shinoda’s. It’s the closest Scorsese’s come to truly contemplative since Kundun, and it shares with that film a sense of wonder at the Natural: this Romanticist conceit that the first testament of God is, as it always has been, Nature. Silence is almost a Terrence Malick film in that sense. In every other, it’s Scorsese coming to terms with the idea that grace is made manifest only through the actions of its proponents. The title refers not just to the Christian God’s notable state when confronted with the unimaginable suffering of His children, but also to Scorsese’s own idea of what God wants from His followers. It’s not thoughts and prayers in the face of tragedy. Maybe it’s humility. Maybe it’s service. Or maybe it’s just silence..

Live by Night (2016)

January 14, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Ben Affleck, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Ben affleck

by Walter Chaw I like Ben Affleck. I like him better as a director than an actor, but I like him in both roles. Live by Night is his The Postman. I mean that with affection, and I suspect the film will likely gain some critical and cult momentum in a few years’ time–but not too much, because Live by Night is not quite stupid enough, strange enough, rough-around-the-corners enough, to really latch onto. What it is, instead, is a throwback to the kinds of movies Taylor Hackford likes to make: glossy, edgeless, overheated prestige entertainments that are sometimes, as was the case with his Proof of Life, more interesting for the publicity drama they create than for the films themselves. If you doubt the Hackford-ness of it, consider the embarrassing amount of time Affleck devotes to “steamy” ’80s-era sex scenes, which are made unbearable by the soulful softcore thrusting. For Live by Night, the external mess is the hubbub over whether or not Affleck will direct an anticipated standalone Batman movie to rescue DC and Warner Bros. from their own curious tone-deafness. The spectre of Batman tends to distract from whatever’s going on in the film, especially as Affleck continues to evolve physically into a perfect cube. Since you’re asking, Live by Night‘s earnest corniness does suggest that he is probably the right man to guide a rebooted Batman franchise.

Hidden Figures (2016)

January 5, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

by Walter Chaw Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures is so inextricably bonded to the rote motions of awards-season biographical uplift melodrama that it functions as proof of a template studios give to directors who won’t kick too much about art and individuality and expression and all that high-falutin’ stuff. Better, it’s proof of an attachment that fits onto the Studio sausage press ensuring that all the mashed and salted discards are extruded in the proper proportion into the collective cow gut. Hidden Figures is the story of three African-American women in the 1960s who go to work for NASA’s Mercury program in the days after the Sputnik launch. It talks about how they’re brilliant but forced to pee in segregated bathrooms; how they’re proud family women but treated like second-class citizens or worse. It positions a white man of power who sees their value all the way through to letting one of the ladies be a co-author on a report she seems to have written herself. It has the end-credits thing where pictures of the real women whose stories the movie ostensibly tells are shown with titles detailing the horrific shit they endured to get their names on a building. Well, one of them anyway. It even has that thing in movies about numbers where there’s a lot of running to try to make math exciting to watch. What it doesn’t have is any lingering impact whatsoever: no gravitas, no surprise, no interest, nothing. The only thing to say about Hidden Figures, really, is that if you spend time praising it, you’re being patronizing–and that is the very definition of irony.