Thriller Archives - Page 10 of 68

House of Games (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by David Mamet

by Bryant Frazer House of Games pivots on a hand of poker that spirals out of control and reveals itself as more than a mere card game. It’s a moral hazard. On one side of the table, holding three of a kind, is Mike (Joe Mantegna), a small-time hood with a big mouth who runs a card room out of the back of House of Games, a pool hall that sits upstairs from a paperback bookstore in downtown Seattle. Across from him, George (the late, great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, in his first film role), who may or may not have drawn to a trips-beating straight or a flush. Spectating from Mike’s side is Margaret (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist (and best-selling author) who stumbled upon the tableau in an effort to negotiate down the debt of a troubled patient (Steve Goldstein), a gambling addict. Impressed by Margaret’s apparent fearlessness–when he makes an oblique threat to kill her, she calls him a bully–Mike enlists her help in a scheme that isn’t cheating, per se, but does rely on duplicity. Simply put, Mike contrives to leave the room for a few minutes; in his absence, Margaret watches for an indication that George is bluffing and signals Mike, quietly, to call.

Ad Astra (2019)

September 18, 20192019, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, China, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat–or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

TIFF 2019: Joker

September 15, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De Niro
written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
directed by Todd Phillips

by Bill Chambers Two moments that soar: in the one, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), having just shed the last vestments of propriety, dons the complete outfit of his alter ego Joker–the green hair, the white face, the purple suit–for the first time and does an impromptu dance to Gary Glitter’s stadium staple “Rock and Roll Part 2” on an empty stairway in Gotham City. In the other, stand-up comic Joker achieves his dream of guesting on “The Murray Franklin Show”. The former is great because the music is at once non-diegetic and clearly prodding Joker; it’s one of the few times we’re indisputably inside his head, and, naturally, he’s soundtracked his grand entrance like he’s the star pitcher coming out to wow the crowd in the sixth inning. (Phoenix is arguably the first actor since Cesar Romero to accept that Joker isn’t just a psychopath, he’s also a complete dork.) The latter distinctly reminded me of Phoenix’s standoffish appearance on Letterman while he was in the throes of shooting the mockumentary I’m Still Here, but the reason the sequence works is that it’s legitimately suspenseful watching Robert De Niro’s Murray Franklin harangue Joker on live television, stoking a burning fuse. De Niro’s presence is of course a nod to Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, in which he’s an aspiring comedian so desperate to do his act on “The Jerry Langford Show” that he stalks and eventually kidnaps the titular Jerry (Jerry Lewis). Despite that legacy casting, a particularly baleful De Niro is morbidly implausible as a talk-show host of legend, yet his proto-Morton Downey Jr. is defensible in that it looks ahead to the rise of today’s angry pundits. Unlike his ingratiating contemporaries (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Jerry Langford)–period markers, including the cheesy glitz of “The Murray Franklin Show”‘s set design, suggest the film takes place circa 1980–Murray seems to be jonesing for conflict. Incidentally, De Niro’s head hasn’t been this square since Midnight Run.

Telluride 2019: The Aeronauts

September 7, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Anne Reid
written by Jack Thorne
directed by Tom Harper

by Walter Chaw If you would’ve thought that a film about the early days of meteorology would be deadly and ridiculous: good call. Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts imagines plucky meteorologist James Glashier (Eddie Redmayne) as a starry-eyed dreamer certain that one day humans will predict the weather badly in front of bluescreens. In pursuit of this, he enlists the aid of tragic hot-air balloonist (well, not hot air at that time–gas of some sort) Amilia Renne (Felicity Jones), a fictional character standing in for the real James Glashier’s erstwhile ballooning companion, Henry Tracey Coxwell. See, all the names are hilarious: the Glashier that will not melt damn the torpedoes, the pretty flying “wren,” and in real life there was a “Coxwell.” Anyhow, Amelia, named after the other woman pilot you know the name of, is a showman, arriving late to the launching grounds riding on top of her carriage (can you imagine!) with her trick dog and her magic voice that carries several football pitches in every direction with no magnification. You can tell from the start that James doesn’t approve of her showboating, except that the way the film is structured–as a series of flashbacks detailing their relationship–it’s clear that James has sought her out because of her draw as a public attraction. You can tell from the start, too, that the real vertical ascent is the friends they’ll become along the way.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

August 13, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris
screenplay by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, based on the series by Alvin Schwartz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (hereafter Scary Stories) is a dulcet, autumnal picture balanced right there between the endless summers of dandelion wine and the interminable and harsh winters of brutality that lie ahead. A project based on a beloved series of children’s books by Alvin Schwartz, it transcends its source by understanding the true function of little nightmares: the stories we tell our kids to begin to toughen them up for lives spent in this hell. Scary Stories unfolds, essentially, in the days between Halloween, 1968 and Election Night (November 5th) of that same year, when Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a date that disrupted 36 years of New Deal expansion. Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, but only after Bobby was shot (just a short while after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot); the beheading of the Democratic party’s progressive soul was now complete. George Wallace, a piece of shit still somehow not as repugnant as Donald Trump, carried five states that night by promising racial segregation. Old footage of Walter Kronkite delivering the results of the election provides the background for a young woman, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), trying in vain to convince the adults that things are not going to be okay before calling her recently-widowed dad to tell him that all the disappointments of the world are not his alone to carry. It would be instructive to watch Scary Stories as the warm-up feature for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Both occupy the same dream-space, the same halcyon “the past” where everything is possible until it isn’t anymore. The surprise is that of the two films, it’s Scary Stories that is the less hopeful.

The Nightingale (2019)

August 4, 20192019, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman
written and directed by Jennifer Kent

by Walter Chaw Philomela was the daughter of King Pandion I of Athens, sister to Procne, who was married to King Tereus of Thrace. After five years apart, Procne asked her husband to fetch Philomela for a visit. During the trip back, he raped her, and when Philomela wouldn't promise to keep quiet about it, Tereus cut out her tongue and left her for dead. She wove the story of the crime into a tapestry, however, and the two sisters, once reunited, boiled Procne and Tereus's son and fed him to Tereus. Upon discovering this, Tereus flew into a rage and the gods changed them each into birds: Procne into a swallow, Tereus into a hoopoe (the king with his crown of feathers), and Philomela into a nightingale, renowned for its song. In literature, the nightingale is associated with truth. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is one of his poems of "negative capacity." The traditional interpretation of it finds the poet falling into a state of death without death, exploring an idea that everything is transient and tends towards decay. It opens like this:

Fantasia Festival ’19: The Art of Self-Defense

July 16, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sports, Thriller

**/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, Imogen Poots, Steve Terada
written and directed by Riley Stearns

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self-Defense is the easier-to-digest version of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but only star Jesse Eisenberg knows it. He’s in The Lobster; everyone else is in an ironic-slopping-over-into-arch indie exercise that presents toxic masculinity and rape culture as something with a potentially upbeat outcome. It’s a fairy tale, in other words–the kind sanitized for your protection, although the occasional flashes of ultra-violence suggest that it was something darker in an earlier conception. What remains is a sometimes mordantly funny social satire that loses first its steam in its middle section (when a post-workout massage doesn’t pull the trigger it should have pulled), then its nerve with a resolution that actually feels pandering and weak-willed. The picture wants very much to console, yet there’s no consolation. I guess the real lesson learned is that the temperature of the room isn’t real interested in hearing how everything’s going to be all right. The key moment left hanging is a confrontation in a parking lot with a random dude who slaps a bag of groceries out of our hero’s hands. It’s aggression from nothing, humiliating for a character we’ve come to like, and evocative of a greater world outside where it’s already too late: The monkeys run the monkey house, and they’re rabid and hungry. Manufacturing a happy ending from this mess is insulting.

Crawl (2019)

July 14, 20192019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Serbia, Thriller

***½/****
starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson
written by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw Haley (Kaya Scodelario) swims in college. She's good. But Alexandre Aja's economical, fierce Crawl opens with Haley coming in second in a freestyle leg. Although she takes it in stride, while talking to her sister and infant nephew a little later she makes snapping gestures with her mouth that hint at some intensity driving her and perhaps seeping into her familial relationships. A quick flashback shows a younger Haley being coached by dad, Dave (Barry Pepper), who tells her not to give her competitors the pleasure of seeing her cry. He reminds her that she's an "apex predator." The script, by the team of Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, is a marvel of spartan efficiency. It's a bear trap. The prologue sets up in just a few brief strokes that the film will be about perseverance, programming, family…and apex predators.

Us (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

June 26, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Get Out was an instant classic that appeared at the spearhead of a new blaxploitation movement. It introduced terms and concepts into the lexicon (“Now you’re in the sunken place”). It attacked race relations with intelligence and, save one tonal slip at the end, maintained an almost unbearable tension throughout. Its signature image of a black face, frozen in terror, the path of a single tear tracing its way down one cheek–you see it three times, on three different characters in the film–encapsulates the black experience: outrage held forever in abeyance, voices stolen by the ruling culture, along with lives and potential lives. Get Out won its writer-director Jordan Peele accolades and the type of laurels (the next Spielberg!, the next Hitchcock!) that, the last time they were handed out (to one M. Night Shyamalan), did the recipient no real favours. And where Get Out asked the question of what Peele’s limits were, Us answers it immediately–and decisively enough that it feels almost cruel. Us has a couple of vaguely interesting ideas it fails to develop, a few set-pieces it fails to pay off, and a central metaphor–literal upper and lower classes being tethered together along some socially-engineered psychic conduit–that it has no real idea what to do with. The two choices for any conversation about Us, then, are to continue treating Peele like a holy, anointed savant/prophet until he makes The Happening (to the extent that Us is not already The Happening, let’s face it), or to say that Us is at best disappointing and at worst just plain bad.

Domino (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, Crime, Denmark, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, France, Italy, Netherlands, Thriller

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil’s Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. “All summer long he recorded his father’s telephone calls,” she writes. “On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father’s office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse.” Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience–oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself–haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he’s directed since 2012’s Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner’s throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who’s blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It’s tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that’s under 90 minutes long.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

May 16, 20192019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane
screenplay by Derek Kolstad and Shay Hatten and Chris Collins & Marc Abrams
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw As the novelty wanes and the universe expands, the John Wick franchise becomes less fleet, though its pleasures, when they arrive, have lost little of their joy. I think of these films, three of them now, as describing the arc of the great Hollywood Musical actors, the Fred Astaires and Gene Kellys, the Liza Minellis and Ginger Rogers and Judy Garlands, who would enliven whatever inanimate book in which they were mired with their irrepressible stagecraft and charisma whenever the spotlight caught them. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (hereafter John Wick 3), in other words, is a slog of mythology linking galvanizing action sequences that are meticulously choreographed, unapologetically brutal, and graceful in every way the picture's story and dialogue are not. They're so good, really, that it hardly matters what the movie's about–so good that it's fair to wonder why they're working so hard at trying to pull coherence out of this premise instead of just offering vague excuses to arm the graceful, lanky, morose hero and drop him in the middle of bad situations. I mean, do they know it's not necessary? Is the world-building mumbo-jumbo a meta-joke on a media landscape now dominated by three or four dynastic storylines?

Hellraiser I II III: The Scarlet Box – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 2019****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2019, Arrow Video, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller, UK

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (a.k.a. Hellraiser) (1987)
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Sean Chapman, Ashley Laurence
written and directed by Clive Barker

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Kenneth Cranham, Imogen Boorman
screenplay by Peter Atkins
directed by Tony Randel

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Terry Farrell, Doug Bradley, Paula Marshall, Ashley Laurence
written by Peter Atkins
directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Pinhead (Doug Bradley) looks menacing, but he’s actually just a leather-daddy who seems reluctant, most of the time, to do what other people think is in his job description. There’s a scene at the end of the first Hellraiser, the only one written and directed by creator Clive Barker, where Pinhead and his good-time boys and girls (“Cenobites,” if you must, an appropriation of another term for “monk”) are about to tear heroic Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) apart when she asks for a chance to explain something. Pinhead patiently hears her out. In the sequel, as she’s running away, rather than hooking her in place with their literal hooks on chains, Pinhead and his Cenobites send the chain to block her way, instead. They’re terrible villains, Cenobites. They’re fun to look at–Hellraiser‘s creature design is, of course, legendary, with Pinhead occupying a privileged place on the Mt. Rushmore of horror bogeys–but more mildly-disapproving Greek Chorus than Iron Maiden. Reason in part, I think, for why they were disastrously made into stock slasher villains in the third film: part wise-cracking Freddy Krueger, part Jason Vorhees rampaging psychopaths. The failure of that metamorphosis and the ensuing wrestling with what role Cenobites should ultimately occupy comprise the minor ups and horrific downs of the seven films (and counting) to follow. Maybe it’s in the name. Maybe the idea never was for the Cenobites, these dour, British, monastic, S&M losers, to be avenging angels, but rather for them to be precisely what they are: these drippy scolds who appear at the exact moment you go searching for more outré porn on an unprotected browser. One of a couple of Pinhead’s catchphrases doubles as a carnival barker’s patter: “We have such sights to show you.” His buddies represent that banner of geeks and sideshow freaks. But they’re not going to force it on you. In the pantheon of bad guys, they’re maybe the only ones who not only need but would like your consent, if you don’t mind, please and thanks ever so.

Pet Sematary (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 17, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Horror, Stephen King, Thriller, Zombie

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist
screenplay by Stephen King, based on his novel
directed by Mary Lambert

“Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart, and yet you cannot buy anything with grief. Because grief is worthless.”
-Jefe (Rubén Blades), The Counselor

by Bill Chambers A VICE UK review of the recent Happy Death Day 2U came in for a shellacking on social media because of a click-baity tweet suggesting it was the “first” slasher movie about grief, a claim that only demonstrated a lack of expertise while making a sacrificial lamb of Happy Death Day 2U (which scarcely benefited from the bad-faith attention). Neither the headline nor the subheader of the review itself is as boldly specious, but there in the body of the piece is this: “Christopher Landon’s latest, Happy Death Day 2U[,] might be the first slasher that actually centers on dealing with grief.” (The headline–“‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Is More About Grief Than Horror”–nevertheless bothers me, too, incidentally: grief is horror.) So often accused of cynicism because they’re formulated to maximize a body count, slashers are engineered to comment on the capricious nature of existence, and the best ones seize on this to acknowledge the toll of loss on the survivors (Black Christmas (1974), Rob Zombie’s Halloween II)–while even the most mediocre ones tend to have a killer motivated by a deep and incurable sorrow (see: The Toolbox Murders (1978), the first Friday the 13^th).

Pet Sematary (2019)

April 5, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

*½/****
starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence, John Lithgow
screenplay by Jeff Buhler, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The best adaptations understand the totality of an author's work, while the worst try to drag something kicking and screaming from one medium into another, largely incompatible, medium. The famous Frank Zappa quote–writing about music is like dancing about architecture–applies, except that it is possible to dance about architecture if you're a brilliant dancer and understand the essence of the architecture you're taking as inspiration. I think Zappa knew that, being Zappa. I like to believe he actually meant that it's possible, but hard. Stephen King's Pet Sematary is exceptional. I reread it for the first time in thirty-three years before watching the new adaptation from co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. I remember, as a child of thirteen, the visceral fear of those last twenty pages or so (and the hot sex scene); now I'll remember it for the extraordinarily observant and sensitive portrayal of grief and loneliness in the novel's first couple-hundred pages. Indeed, the first sentence, talking about how men sometimes meet the man who should have been their father in the middle of their lives, immediately reduced me to tears. Both the Lambert and the Kölsch/Widmyer adaptations focus on the twenty-page payoff, not the two-hundred pages of poetry.

What the Fest!? ’19: Depraved (2019)

March 22, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

**½/****
starring David Call, Joshua Leonard, Ana Kayne, Alex Breaux
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw Depraved, the first film that Larry Fessenden has both written and directed since 2006’s The Last Winter, is a smart, borderline scholarly take on the Frankenstein story, honouring the literary “borrowing” of the Mary Shelley novel as well as the sociological, post-WWI concerns driving the James Whale adaptation of the same. Adam (Alex Breaux), its monster, is, eventually, articulate, literate–a romantic figure in the Romanticist sense, yearning for meaning in the arms of a woman. Adam is also the walking wounded from one of our interchangeable forever wars, mirroring the walking wounded from WWI mutilated by the teeth of mechanized warfare who survived at the hands of improved medicine. There’s also a subplot about a pharmaceutical industry run amok and, in the appearance of a little silver charm, a cookie for the Fessenden fetishist who might remember a similar totem from the filmmaker’s masterpiece, Wendigo. There is, in other words, a lot. Enough so that Depraved spends more time digging its basement than it does wiring its house–a deficiency shared by Fessenden’s first run at the Frankenstein story, his principled but didactic 1991 feature debut, No Telling.

Us (2019)

March 20, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
written and directed by Jordan Peele

Venom (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 13, 20192018, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze
written by Jeff Pinkner & Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Bryant Frazer The history of Venom, a rippled black mass of sentient alien muscle with a ‘roided-out appearance and a gnarly personality to match, is complicated even for a comic-book origin story. It goes sorta like this: Way back in the 1980s, the Marvel Comics powers-that-be were looking to juice interest in Spider-Man. As a solution, they gave him a sleek black-and-white costume to replace the familiar red-and-blue outfit. Long story short, that suit turned out to be an alien symbiote with a mind of its own; it insinuates itself into human bodies and coexists with them in an ostensibly mutually beneficial relationship. It didn’t take long for Spidey to get wise and ditch the organism, but Marvel brought Spidey’s black-and-white look back later by having Black Cat sew him a non-sentient version of the costume. By then, Marvel was wooing artist Todd McFarlane to the book. Sure, McFarlane said, he was interested in Spider-Man–old-school, red-and-blue Spider-Man. So Marvel scrambled to once again get rid of the black outfit.

Ocean’s 8 (2018) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

March 11, 20192018, 2019, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

Ocean’s Eight
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Gary Ross & Olivia Milch
directed by Gary Ross

by Walter Chaw Gary Ross’s Ocean’s Eight is the perfect nightmare: something you’re rooting for sociologically that’s artistically bad. It’s a film with an all-female cast that tries very hard to be racially diverse as well–unlike Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, for example, which declines to show any Chinese people in its New York City, even though it’s set largely above a Chinese restaurant. Similarly, the kindest thing that could be said about Ocean’s Eight is that it’s strangely listless, aggressively mediocre, doggedly unmemorable, while the most accurate thing that could be said about it is that it could have benefited from people of colour in some kind of meaningful role behind the camera. The time is coming, hopefully soon, where movies that just take intellectual properties and recast them with women will also be written and directed by women–who, you know, probably have something to say about women. Although Olivia Milch, hyphenate behind the decent Dude (and probably the only reason Awkwafina got a shot at Ocean’s Eight, pre-Crazy Rich Asians), co-wrote this one with Ross, Ocean’s Eight has “glad-handing equivocation” written all over it. I don’t want to say it’s terrible, but…but, I really don’t. Best to say that Ocean’s Eight won’t ruin any careers because the women are already established stars and Gary Ross, as a white guy in the business, is essentially bulletproof and fire retardant, too. True equality, after all, is when women are allowed to make movies this awful and, like their male counterparts, don’t spend any time in movie jail for the offense, either.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

February 4, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/****
starring Rosa Salazar, Mahershala Ali, Eiza González, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, based on the manga series "Gunnm" by Yukito Kishiro
directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw There's one genuinely good thing about Alita: Battle Angel and it has to do with a cameo by Jeff Fahey as a guy who really likes dogs. It's good because it's good to like dogs, but it also reminds of Fahey's villain from Silverado, who has a pretty great line about a dog; and it's good to be reminded of Silverado. In other words, the one genuinely good thing about Alita is there's something in it that, on purpose, reminds me of a good movie. The rest of it is noisy juvenilia taking place in the Sharkboy and Lavagirl universe–a YA disaster featuring the usual mysterious girl with the secret past who turns out to be a super-soldier and yadda yadda yadda. Jesus, does it break no new ground. Scrapper-cum-cyborg-engineer-slash-bounty-hunter Ido (Christoph Waltz, desperately hoping QT picks up the phone again) discovers the "core" of Alita (voiced and mo-capped by Rosa Salazar), basically her Victorian locket-silhouette parts, in the junkyard of a floating city housing the elites of this world ("300 YEARS AFTER THE FALL") and immediately grafts it to his dead daughter's unused robot body, because in addition to the movie being structurally unambitious and curiously sexist, it's also defiantly ableist. "I made her fast little legs," Ido says, mournfully, and then we get a flashback to the dead little girl being punched out of her wheelchair by a cyborg Ido created to compete in a future-game called "Rollerball"–I mean, "Murderskates." I don't know. Who cares. It's on roller skates and cyborgs do it. Oh, and they kill a dog.

Piercing (2019)

January 31, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Mia Wasikowska, Laia Costa, Olivia Bond
written and directed by Nicolas Pesce

by Walter Chaw Opening with a vintage “Feature Presentation” bumper and sporting a couple of lengthy, giallo-inspired transitions scored by vintage needle-drops (Goblin‘s Tenebrae theme pops up at one point), Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing is hamstrung by a peculiar lack of energy and the casting of Mia Wasikowska, who can be very good in a particular type of role (Damsel, Stoker) but is just as often miscast (Alice in Wonderland, Crimson Peak). Piercing wants to be a psychosexual pas de deux between broken people looking to quiet some demons and ends up holding no real surprises over too long a period. It does begin well, as schlubby Reed (Christopher Abbot) thinks about shoving a knitting needle into his baby, who later tells him, in a surprising baritone, to kill a hooker. If only the picture had carried through on that promise to be arthouse Larry Cohen rather than listless De Palma. Alas, once Reed packs his bags for a business trip, makes notes on how he’s going to do the deed, and solicits high-priced escort Jackie (Wasikowska), it’s clear that Piercing is going to be lugubrious at best and declining at worst. It’s a tease. High-minded, arch, and, fatally, superior to the material.